4 Examples of Marketing Ads Gone Wrong

There are many times when marketing messages, though memorable and clever, turn into a disaster for the brand. This happens when the company didn’t think through the campaign or discover some loopholes which could land them into trouble. If you live in York U residence and you are currently taking a marketing course, the examples below should help you to think through marketing campaigns before launching.

Pepsi – Drink Pepsi, Get Stuff

Pepsi started a campaign where users could collect points for every can of soda they bought. The points could then be redeemed to win merchandise such as t-shirts and hats. To promote this campaign, Pepsi came up with a commercial which featured a kid who collected 7 million points and purchased a Harrier jet. A 21-year-old saw this commercial and took it literally. He went to collect millions of points and then sued the brand when he couldn’t purchase the jet. Although the lawsuit was not successful for him, it is a lesson learnt that brands should be keen on the commercials they put out there for promoting their ongoing campaigns.

Chevrolet – Make Your Own Tahoe Commercial

In a bid to promote one of its SUVs, The Tahoe, Chevrolet launched the “make your own Tahoe commercial” on their website. This campaign allowed anyone to footage what the company had filmed on how the car was made and make their own edits in order to come up with a customized version of the SUV. However, this was followed by unfriendly content that highlighted how the SUVs are ruining the environment. Chevrolet had to pull down the campaign on their website.

American Airlines – First Class Flights for Life

The American Airlines launched a campaign where they were offering lifetime tickets at a cost of $250,000 promoting it as the last ticket you’ll ever buy. This basically means that after paying this cost, you would never be charged for a ticket regardless of where you travel with the airline. Though American Airlines expected few people to buy the tickets, they got more people buying than what they expected. As a result, they incurred losses since some would travel too many times in a month.

Pepsi – Number Fever

Another marketing campaign that went wrong in Philippines was the “Number Fever” which was created to make the soda more popular in the region. This is how the campaign worked. All the soda bottle caps contain a three-digit code on the bottom. The brand announced a winning code where a million pesos was to be granted to the winner. Overall, the campaign was successful in creating brand awareness. The only problem came in when it was time to pay out the winners. The number “349” was printed on more than 800,000 bottle caps. Thousands of people showed up with the winning code and the company was faced with the challenge of paying up thousands of dollars. The brand lost $10 million dollars in legal fees even though the case was thrown out.