33 Misleading Marketing Campaigns and Downright Desperate Ads That Should Be Nuked From Our Collective Consciousness
Just put addictive substances in your product and call it a day
![33 Misleading Marketing Campaigns and Downright Desperate Ads That Should Be Nuked From Our Collective Consciousness](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/9/9/1062099_320x180.jpg)
Big tobacco and alcohol companies approach marketing with a kind of glee you can only feel when you know your customers are chemically addicted to your product. They're out there having fun, trying weird stuff, making frogs and camels talk. That makes these sad attempts at marketing all the more pathetic…
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![Land Rover tried to make folding car seats with a phone app look adventurous. RTS ABO To advertise its app for rearranging car seats from anywhere, they had Bear Grylls and a bunch of other guys jump out of a plane and fold up a Land Rover's seats during freefall. Once they landed, they got in and sat down on the raised seats, then drove off. CRACKED.COM](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/8/5/1062185.jpg)
![Checkers Drive-In said its 99c burgers were fuel for human hi-performance. In the '90s, Checkers had an animated campaign with Fast and the Furious-type racers in an apocalyptic wasteland, who murdered each other for Checkers burgers. When they ate one, the hi-performance human fuel gauge in their car would jump to full. CRACKED.COM](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/7/7/1062177.jpg)
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![Jolly Rancher thought prison rape would sell candy. JOL ran GET BUSY SUCKING OR GET BUSY DYING! A tweet that stayed up for a weekend had a blue candy prisoner telling the reader, Get busy sucking or get busy dying! Not only was it a prison rape joke and a threat, it was also twisting a pop culture message of hope (from The Shawshank Redemption). CRACKED.COM](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/7/0/1062170.jpg)
![CPA Canada tried to make CPAs look like rock stars. They ran a commercial claiming that, actually, CPAs do cool things like saving the environment and changing music's business model. If that's boring, then call us boring, they dared the viewers. CRACKED.COM](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/7/4/1062174.jpg)
![Penguin floor cleaner used child prostitution to sell cleaning products. FILTH HAS NOWHERE TO HIDE Their ad shows a businessman with a bulge in his pants paying a schoolgirl - all of which we see only as a reflection on the super-shiny floor. Filth has nowhere to hide, says the tagline, totally not trivializing pedophilia. CRACKED.COM](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/7/1/1062171.jpg)
![Kraft's Crave brand is the frozen food for wannabe tough guys, apparently. In an ad, a spokesman brags that Crave is here to grab the frozen food aisle by the snowballs. Then he grabs two imaginary, uh, snowballs. Crave isn't just meat, it's bacon, he clarifies, with air quotes around meat. CRACKED.COM](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/7/6/1062176.jpg)
![For Subway, choosing sandwich toppings is as wild as anything. MAKE IT EPIC. Don't adidas either Their Make it what you want ad shows people playing music in the back of a pickup, standing on a moving motorcycle, skating over fire, and way more. All to promote being able to choose what goes in your sandwich. CRACKED.COM](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/7/3/1062173.jpg)
![In Germany, chocolate company Ferrero ran a white-nationalist-like ad. YES WEISS BAN E V Their ad for a new white chocolate spoofed an Obama rally, with the slogan Yes weiss can! (Yes white can!) And the slogan the ad wrapped up with was Germany votes white. Germany having the history it does, this didn't go over too well. CRACKED.COM](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/8/2/1062182.jpg)
![Would you murder to keep your butt clean? Toletta thinks so. GET YOUR OWN Their ads shows women killing each other in public restrooms over $3 toilet seat covers. A small price to pay for not having to sit on a public toilet seat, apparently. Toletta's defense? Well, these are high fashion ads. CRACKED.COM](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/8/4/1062184.jpg)
![Coke, somehow, tried to cash in on apathy. Colle - A Diet Coke commercial with Gillian Jacobs has her basically shrugging and saying do whatever. She says that marathons are super hard, and you can go live in a yurt if you want. The takeaway? Drink Diet Coke or something, whatever, not like it matters anyway. CRACKED.COM](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/8/3/1062183.jpg)
![To poke Ford about its aluminum cars, Chevy set a grizzly bear loose. In Chevrolet's ad, a grizzly is released into a cement room with test subjects, who are told to get into a steel or aluminum cage. They pick the steel one, always. Then, the announcer reveals the new, steel-built Chevrolet Silverado. CRACKED.COM](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/8/1/1062181.jpg)
![It's clever to use suicide in beauty branding ... right? for happier hair, dark or fair anatomicals peachy head peach shampoo for suicidal hair de elita и n alt Jom n por only abile adida Mentiful and colour, for this see . want el state heaven dye clitte late, conditioning me, page by wonderfully 1 knew but job. hair you tossing completely and of bring to i just here I never complete the follow would for de wacky your was rocks put your & Itself on peach de actually knew world feeling earth. that locks bald. Twitter body below. depression off de down](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/8/0/1062180.jpg)
![Target associated plus-size women with manatees. add to registry add to list Mossimo® Women s Plus-Size Kimono Maxi Dress - Assorted Colors 12 reviews $22.00 Free shipping when you spend $50 choose color: Manatee Gray quantity: size : 1 Please make a selection Target listed kimono maxi dresses in regular size as dark heather gray. In plus size, they were called manatee gray. Target said that both names are regularly used, and this happened because different teams posted the different dress information. CRACKED.COM](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/6/9/1062169.jpg)
![Belgian comedy magazine Humo ran a 9/11 ad in 2004. - - - - - - - - Back when the site of the World Trade Center was still an empty lot called Ground Zero, Humo tried to milk comedy from the tragedy. Their ad showed pilots about to crash into the WTC because they were too busy reading Humo. CRACKED.COM](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/7/8/1062178.jpg)
![Dolce and Gabbana's Gang Rape Ad OLCE & GABBANIA CRACKED.COM In 2007, Dolce and Gabbana advertised their spring collection with a print ad of a woman presumably wearing a D&G dress, but it's kind of hard to tell under- neath the man holding her down while three other men look on with expres- sions that can only be described as patiently rapey. It was quickly banned from publication in Italy by the country's somewhat misleadingly named Advertising Self-Discipline Insti- tute, who released a statement amounting to, Come on. Like, serious- ly, come on.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/6/8/1062168.jpg)
![Dacia's Car Commercial That Offends Everyone CRACKED.COM Romanian car company Dacia made what AdWeek described as the most offensive car commercial ever in 2011, using dick jokes and ethnic stereotypes to offend the elderly, car salesmen, and the entire country of Romania. Warning: There are ra- cial slurs for the Romani people in that commercial. Like, whoa, really bad ones.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/6/7/1062167.jpg)
![Calvin Klein's Pedophiley Brooke Shields Ad CRACKED.COM Calvin Klein is known for their gross commercials, but they went too far for CBS and ABC in 1980, when the net- works banned a commercial featuring a panning shot over the body of a very 15-year-old-looking Brooke Shields, in- cluding directly into her crotch, before she peers coyly into the camera and whispers, You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing. Poor Shields didn't even real- ize what she was implying about her undergarment situation.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/6/6/1062166.jpg)
![eHarmony Step aside, fate. It's time science had a go at love. gine being able to stack the odds of finding lasting love entirely in your favour. rmony's mistry so scientifically-proven don't have to. Why matching leave the system most decodes important the search mystery of your of compatibility life to chance? and you You know those eHarmo- ny ads that go on and on about their scientifically proven matching sys- tem? You can't see them in the U.K. Because that's not what science is.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/6/5/1062165.jpg)
![Nottingham's Anti-Begging Ads CRACKED.COM City councils and police are some other groups that are typically pretty careful with their messaging, but in 2016, a joint effort by the city of Nottingham put up posters all over town depicting homeless people misusing panhandling money, claiming that such money just goes to a fraud or up in smoke. The posters were obviously immediately defaced by the public, who made it clear they'd rath- er fund some guy's weed than these ads, and the ASA banned them for just being, like, really jerky.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/6/0/1062160.jpg)
![An Online Gambling Site's Pay For Your Wife's Cancer Treatment Ad 888 2 YEARS of excellence casino 15 £88 £50 £20 CRACKED COM Gambling websites are usually really careful to claim that bankrupting your- self with their services is for entertain- ment only, so it was pretty bold for the website 888 to run an advertisement depicting a depressed man who had sold his house to pay for his wife's can- cer treatment discovering the site while waiting outside the hospital and won over 30 times his annual salary in a single spin. Bold enough to get banned by the](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/6/4/1062164.jpg)
![White Wellbeing o PENTAN - I Three Facebook ads - captura ther C - auto Adverting de Facebook nation way Your people are here CRACKED COM Facebook had a real problem with conservative extremist ads in 2020. After an ad for something claiming that White people make up just 8% of the world's popula- tion, so if you flood all white-ma- jority countries with non-whites, you eliminate white children for ever was noticed on the network, they scrambled to take it down.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/6/1/1062161.jpg)
![Klarna's Lift My Mood Into Debt Ads مصا \pp CRACKED.COM At the height of restrictions on public gathering during the COVID-19 pan- demic, the buy now, pay later service Klarna paid a bunch of influencers to post that using the service lifted their moods during the lockdown, only to be struck down by the ASA for the im- plication that pandemic-induced de- pression and anxiety can be relieved by going into debt. Basically, they said the quiet part out loud.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/6/3/1062163.jpg)
![Anti-Government Boogaloo Ads OF GRACKED.COM 2020 was not a year marked by its po- litical unity, but just to rile people up further, a group of anti-government or- ganizations known as Boogaloos (why are they always so embarrassingly named?) started creating ads for social media imploring people to join the mi- litia, fight the state through violent clips from action movies. Facebook re- sponded with a resounding whoopsie and pulled the ads.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/5/9/1062159.jpg)
![Natural Cycles's Entire Existence - - SarasCycles Progras 5M veckan - - - eski for 100 Idag de can en KRYS OF - 1000 Same mar 2015 20 17 P 40 5 3 2 - S M DE S 11 V DE 19 38 XI OF 29 27 2M 25 26 V In 2018, a fertility-tracking app 2 1 S called Natural Cycles tried to undo a is un generation of sex ed by claiming to Z be a highly accurate contraceptive CRACKED.COM ad in a series of Facebook ads. They were forced to pull the ads by the ASA,](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/6/2/1062162.jpg)
![Yves St. Laurent's Skeletal Model CRACKED.COM Also in 2015, the ASA banned a print ad for Yves St. Laurent that featured a model who was al- ready extremely thin but then also lit in such a way that made her appear on the verge of death. They can't even find an actual body thin enough for high fashion anymore.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/5/4/1062154.jpg)
![XLS-Medical Max Strength Diet Pills GRACKED.COM A 2015 ad for diet pills was banned by the ASA for taking an irresponsi- ble approach to body image and confidence by featuring an already unusually slim young woman com- plaining that she'll never fit into the clothes she bought for vacation, a problem seemingly more easily solved by exchanging them. Now do all diet pill ads.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/5/7/1062157.jpg)
![Rachel Weisz Revitalift Ad L'OREAL اليوم REVITALIER CRACKED.COM The ASA also banned a 2012 ad for L'Oreal Revitalift anti-wrinkle cream featuring a suspiciously smooth-faced Rachel Weisz that read, Wrinkles appear reduced, skin looks smoother, complexion looks more even. It's not a facelift, it's Revitalift. It turned out it wasn't either r - - it was Pho- toshop.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/5/6/1062156.jpg)
![Taken 2's Fake Reviews CRACKED.COM Presumably clued in by lines like Eat your heart out, 007 and 10 out of 10, which no self-respecting film reviewer would ever say about even their favorite movie, a Spo- tify ad for Taken 2 was banned by the UK's Advertising Standards Authority on the grounds that its endorsements were obvi- ously fake. The production company be- hind the movie tried to claim they'd cleared the endorsements with the news- paper they attributed, but the person they got permission from wasn't even the same one who wrote the review. It could have been the](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/5/8/1062158.jpg)
![Would You Rather Slap Rihanna or Punch Chris Brown? CRACKED COM In 2018, Snapchat pulled an ad for a game called Would You Rather?! that asked users whether they'd prefer to slap Rihanna or punch Chris Brown, which would be bad enough if some of those things hadn't actu- ally happened. The game itself ар- parently had questions about, among other things, raping llamas, so at least it was upfront about its tastelessness.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/5/5/1062155.jpg)