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Have you heard about Burger King’s new Texican Whopper? The taste of Texas and a little, spicy Mexican – and they do mean little. The ad for the new product ran only briefly in Spain and the United Kingdom before the Mexican government demanded it be pulled. Seems they don’t like having their countrymen depicted as three-foot-tall wrestlers who wear the Mexican flag as a cape. A flop? You decide. The ad has been viewed about a half-million times on YouTube. Here are a few more promotions that didn’t go the way the marketing gurus had planned.
1. McDonald’s gives away free virus
You wouldn’t normally expect McDonald’s to run a promotion giving away free Trojans (Trojan viruses, that is). In Japan, McDonald’s gave away 10,000 MP3 players, fully loaded with 10 free songs. Problem is, many of them were also loaded with a QQPass Trojan virus that captured user info and sent it to hackers as soon as it was plugged into a computer. That’s 10,000 folks who weren’t necessarily lovin’ it.
2. Hell Pizza brings out the dead
This one’s kinda creepy. New Zealand-based chain Hell Pizza ran a Halloween ad on their website depicting the skeletal remains of Sir Edmund Hillary and Heath Ledger, just months after their deaths. The spot obviously drew complaints, but wasn’t pulled until November 3rd – definitely enough time to associate Hell Pizza with a whole lot of bad taste.
3. Pepsi’s ballgame blowout
Here’s one that just happened. Earlier this month, Pepsi offered to give away 250 pairs of Yankee Stadium opening day tickets. But when the Pepsi reps showed up in Times Square, instead of the 250 pairs of the promised tickets, they showed up with just 100 sets, and most were for a game in June. As one would expect, this basically led to a mob scene, with angry fans yelling “Pepsi sucks!” and pouring cans of soda out on the street. Now is this the kind of hope they were talking about?
4. Domino’s has their own bailout
Have you noticed the recent trend of companies giving something back in these trying economic times? Car companies who suspend payments if you lose your job, restaurants that offer free food, and Domino’s giving away pizzas to anyone that types in the code “bailout.” Only problem is the promotion hadn’t actually been approved before the code got out and 11,000 free pies were given out. Company reps blamed the error on a computer glitch, or hackers. But Domino’s actually looked pretty good after this one for honoring the giveaway.
5. Everyone’s a Pepsi winner in the Philippines
This is an honest mistake, but it’s still pretty interesting. In 1992, Pepsi offered 1 million pesos to anyone finding a bottlecap with 349 printed on it. The problem…half a million bottlecaps got printed with 349, which would have cost 18 billion dollars. Pepsi ended up paying winners $19.00, which still cost them ten million dollars. Not only that, but bottling plants were attacked, and many Pepsi execs had to leave the country. And you thought Yankee fans could get angry.
6. McDonald’s McAfrika Burger
Also in 2002, Norwegian McDonald’s restaurants had the bright idea to name a burger after a place where millions of people were facing starvation. Reps said the McAfrika sandwich was based on an authentic African recipe, but that didn’t stop many in Norway from accusing McDonald’s of extreme insensitivity. McDonald’s considered donating proceeds to famine relief, but ended up allowing relief agencies to place collection boxes in participating restaurants. I think that was the same year they considered the McTsunami filet-o-fish.
7. Carl’s Jr’s winning code goes viral
And finally, file another one under the “whoops” category. A recent Carl’s Jr. online promotion for a free $2.75 “Famous Star” hamburger coupon went a little too viral. 276 winning contestants were texted a passcode and a 48-hour-only URL where they could download their coupon. And as the saying goes, they told two friends…who each told two friends…and so on…and so on. A day later, hundreds of websites were posting the URL and passcode, and the company had to shut down the promotion. Apparently viral isn’t always a good thing. [Photo credit: Adrian Lamo.]
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Comments (21)
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I work for an ad agency who used to have Hell Pizza as a client – they’ve always enjoyed controversial campaigns – you joke about McDonalds offering Trojans, but Hell Pizza once sent out condoms to promote it’s new ‘Lust’ Pizza.
In the end, although their campaigns always achieved lucrative PR and we could go crazy on the creative ideas, it just wasn’t worth fanning off the scores of complaints via the advertising standards authority – we eventually parted ways
posted by dangermouse on 4-29-2009 at 12:52 am
“seized from a secured website and distributed illegally”! Ha!
I remember a Snapple promotion (I think it was Snapple) in New York near Union Square a few years back. They had a giant popsicle that melted all over the street and made the whole area a sticky mess. Does Snapple make popsicles? Maybe it was another brand. Whoever it was, not what they intended.
posted by Ben on 4-29-2009 at 1:11 am
Some of these ad blunders are just embarrassing.
posted by Joe on 4-29-2009 at 4:11 am
I remember the Snapple event. There was red, sticky strawberry liquid all over the street. Nice catch…I should’ve included that one.
posted by Jellio on 4-29-2009 at 6:01 am
Even though I collected over a hundred Pepsi bottle caps back in 1992, I never got the “lucky” 349 number.
posted by Danny on 4-29-2009 at 10:18 am
I think the funniest promotion of all, despite it being a fictional one, was done on the old sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. Remember? For Thanksgiving, they were going to give away free turkeys and they dropped them out of a helicopter. Unfortunately nobody told them turkeys couldnt fly. I loved Les Nessman’s “Oh, the humanity”. That was good comedy.
posted by Dave on 4-29-2009 at 10:27 am
Dominoes may have looked good because they made good on their problem but they aren’t looking that great anymore after the nice video of the employees putting bodily waste on their sandwiches and pizza.
posted by Kevin on 4-29-2009 at 10:33 am
That would be an interesting column… stories of evidence of some kind (be it photos or video) exposing employees (not necessarily only in food) doing things behind the scenes rather unbecoming of an employee.
Even better if the evidence was widely spread to the public in some fashion, even if it just photos printed in lots of newspapers around the country and/or world.
posted by Sarah in CA on 4-29-2009 at 10:51 am
Dave – The best line from that episode:
“As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!”
posted by Gman on 4-29-2009 at 11:03 am
The Burger King TexMex deal may of been funny, but not to the people here in Mexico. The people here take the flag very seriously. It is a national symbol, and it not used as a piece of clothing.
posted by Steve C on 4-29-2009 at 11:32 am
Remember the short lived Domino’s radio advertisement from the mid 90s? It was for a pizza called The Dominator. Their slogan, “The Dominator walks all over the competition with 6 inch heels!”
And then there was the Coors Light commercial with the slogan Turn It Loose Tonight. When translated into Spanish, this phrase basically meant, “Coors Light will give you diarrhea.” Probably not what the ad agency intended.
posted by Tex on 4-29-2009 at 11:40 am
Back in the mid 90’s, Pepsi introduced a promotional campaign called “Pepsi Stuff.” As a joke, they advertised a Harrier Jet as one of the prizes (I think it was worth several million points). Some grad student actually found a loophole in the system, purchased the points at $0.10 a piece, and went to Pepsi to claim his jet. They laughed him off and naturally he sued Pepsi. In the end I think Pepsi won with the judge saying that no one in their right mind could believe a multi-million dollar jet could be bought for only a few hundred thousand dollars.
posted by Josh on 4-29-2009 at 12:29 pm
I had the chance to see on the news about that ad depicting a small, Mexican wrestler wearing Mexico’s flag. Here in Mexico we are not allowed to wear the flag in any way. So, yes, it was pretty offensive to us. Whatever thing that promotes a stereotype from any country should not be portrayed either.
posted by Yessika on 4-29-2009 at 3:08 pm
Too recent for the list I guess, but I think Dr.Pepper’s promise of a free Dr.Pepper to everyone in America except Slash and Buckethead if Guns N Roses’s “Chinese Democracy” album was actually released in 2008 will go down in history as a listworthy advertising “oops”.
It’s awesome that they made an honest attempt to make good on the promise. I got my free Dr.Pepper from it.
posted by Melissa on 4-29-2009 at 3:54 pm
I was so sure that the “I’d Hit It” banner ads for McDonald’s quarter pounder would be included.
posted by Sarah on 4-29-2009 at 6:28 pm
Hey Danny, I’ve never seen that wierd trick in our country’s contest history. Probably because I wasn’t born yet when they put that 349 Pepsi contest. Is it me or is it that the Philippines always appear in mental_floss?
posted by Karl on 4-29-2009 at 9:14 pm
The Hoover company (yes, the vacuum cleaner maker) back in 1992 made an ENORMOUS blunder. It gave away two free round-trip tickets to anywhere in Europe with the purchase of a Hoover vacuum priced greater than £100.
This error cost Hoover (and its parent company at the time Maytag) £50 million.
posted by Gordon Daily on 5-4-2009 at 2:31 pm
I contracted with a promotional company that did the game cards for a Monday Night Football promotion back in the 90s. It was one of those “watch the game and if your ticket number is announced, you win a new Dodge Durango”. Well, these tickets also had scratch prizes and one of the prizes was a pair of tickets to a Busch Series race, of which we had 100 pairs. The promotional company did some reverse algorithm to predict how many of the tickets would be distributed, how many would get scratched and came out to how many needed to be “winners” for the Busch tickets for us to give out all 100 pairs. What the dumbasses didn’t do was shuffle the game pieces, so stacks of consecutive Busch ticket winners were going to a multi location fast food restaurant that has golden arches. Since it was not a golden arch specific promotion that required purchase, the minimum wage workers that worked at the franchises just placed stacks of the game pieces on the counter.
The result: over 300 people claimed to be winners of the race tickets. There would have been more, but several were the same people sending in multiple winners in one envelope, which fortunately was a violation of the rules OR we’d have had over 750 winners (1,500 tickets). The race track FREAKED OUT when they heard this, refusing to give us more than the 200 tickets they had allotted. Luckily, they offered to sell us the additional 400+ tickets we did need at a 50% discounted rate.
posted by Ambrose on 5-5-2009 at 1:37 pm
I recall back in the late 1980’s the 7 UP company offered a free mini basketball if you got a bottle cap with a certain symbol in it (I think it was “Spot”, the red dot logo). I was a major consumer of 7 UP at the time (mixed with bourbon) and won something like 25 or 30 mini basketballs. Evidently, a lot of other people did as well because they stopped the promo and sent me (and a lot of oter people, I am sure) a $1 off coupon. I was annoyed, to say the least.
/I now drink Sprite with my bourbon.
posted by Lee451 on 5-5-2009 at 9:39 pm
What about Absolut Vodka’s “In An Absolut World” campaign in Mexico last year? They sure took some heat over that one…
posted by Robert on 5-6-2009 at 1:46 pm
Well the KFC/Oprah grilled chicken fiasco has to take the cake when it comes to promotion fiascoes… if the riots in NYC were any indication.
posted by Dave on 5-9-2009 at 2:40 pm