“KFC Decided To Give Out Free Chicken For 1 Day”: 44 Absolutely Tragic PR Catastrophes

Last year, Nestlé tried to make an #AskNestle hashtag happen on Twitter in Germany. The questions they received included: "why are you letting children starve?", "why do you support child labor?" and "why do you hate the rain forest?". Guess that didn't turn out too well for them.

There is this department store in Brazil that had put in their TV ads 'buy anything you want for the price you want' and some guy decided to buy a bunch of expensive stuff and said he was willing to pay only 1$. The store said he couldn't and then he proceeded to sue the company and eventually won the lawsuit. They removed it from TV.

Pepsi started a marketing campaign in Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan "Come Alive with the Pepsi Generation" came out as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead.".

We Are All Leo Messi. Messi was impliciated in tax fraud and got found guilty in Spain. His team, F.C. Barcelona, started the campaign we are all leo messi, in his support. Because we're all really good at soccer, get paid s**t tons, and exploit the economic system. When you make 22.6 million dollars a year without endorsements. Just pay your f*****g taxes. I do it and I get paid like 7.50 an hour.

That time that Burger King released a 6 second ad with the "OK Google, what is the whopper burger?". This triggered any nearby Google devices to give a description of the whopper burger, except that it got the info straight from Wikipedia, so people just went to the Wikipedia whopper page and changed the information to say things like "contains children" and "contains traces of cyanide".

Eventually Google just said f**k it and made the ad not work with Google devices anymore if I remember correctly.

I remember there was a PR guy who did a press conference for a new computer. When that was a big deal.

After praising the heck out of the current model, he uttered the words, "And next year's model will be even better!"

So the buying public decided enmass to wait for next year's model. Which never came because there were no profits from the current year.

Two years ago, the Pittsburgh Penguins decided to do a Q&A session on Twitter involving James Neal, a skilled player with....well, let's say that he's not exactly known for fair play. He has a history of borderline and outright dirty play, including cross-checking opponents in the face, elbowing them in the head, and also an incident of kneeing an opponent in the head.

Sample questions from various hockey fans:

* James, do you get the biggest thrill out of kneeing someone in the head or cross checking them in the head?

* Do you make rocket noises when you launch yourself at peoples' heads? if not, why?

* Do you think before cross-checking people in the head or is it just pure instinct?

* If you opened a bar how cheap would your shots be

* what part of the stick should I be holding to really lay a good cross check to someone's head?

* If a tree falls down in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does James Neal still cross check it in the face?

* what favorite memory have you robbed from one of the players you kneed to the head?

* A train leaves NYC traveling at 97 mph, another train leaves LA traveling at 76 mph, when do you headshot the child riding coach?

* if you could go back in time and play with any player in history, which one would you knee in the face?

* if you were holding a baby and dropped it on its head, would it already be unconscious from your previous elbow to the head?

* James, my roommate stole my food. should I lunge at his head, elbow him in the temple or drive my knee into his skull?

* If the moon was made of BBQ Spare Ribs, would you still leave your feet to charge at it?

* when you go into a corner and there are 3 people, and you only have 2 elbows, how do u decide which one gets kneed?

Probably Mars Ice Cream, a couple of decades ago, in the UK.

They planned an entire month's summer campaign on Capital Radio, starting in June. When the 'trigger temperature' reached 21 degrees C, all these promotions, competitions, give-aways etc etc would kick off.

So the Capital DJs were announcing the imminent start of the great ice cream event and....

It was cold and rainy. For week after week after week. In fact, the mercury stayed stubbornly below 21 degrees for the entire time the campaign was supposed to run, and it never kicked off at all.

Moral - don't rely on the British weather as the lynch-pin of anything.

Susan Boyle had an album release party. The PR company came up with the hashtag #susanalbumparty.

The Balloonfest '86.

Basically what happened was the United Way of America tried to break the world record for most balloons released at once by releasing 1.5 million balloons as a harmless publicity stunt. What they didn't realize was that what goes up must come back down. The falling balloons cause millions of dollars in property damage, the deaths of a few fishermen, difficulties in air navigation, and preumably a ton of wildlife k****d.

Not only did they get negative publiciy and lawsuits, the balloons caused an *actual* disaster.

The Union Street Guest House (hotel) threatened to levy a $500 fine against customers who left a negative Yelp review. Then the internet found out. Hundreds of people proceeded to spam their Yelp page with negative reviews. They're no longer in business.

Some years back, there was an incident where a Greyhound passenger went crazy and beheaded another passenger.

Greyhound had just rolled out an ad campaign titled "road rage? You've never heard of bus rage".

It was very quickly, very quietly pulled.

Cigarette companies trying to spin the benefits of smoking.

Remember when they tried to convince us that smaller infant weights were a preferred thing? Or that smoking was healthy? Every time they turned their PR engine on, stupidity and arrogance poured out.

In 1993, Pepsi ran a contest in the Philippines promising one million pesos ($40,000) to whoever found the number 349 on their bottle cap. But they accidentally made 800,000 winning caps. The mistake led to death threats against Pepsi executives and nationwide outrage.

The Swedish PR firm Locum spelling their name without a capital "L" and with a heart instead of an "o".

Gerald Ratner. It's a well known story, but I'll tell it for those who haven't heard it before. He owned a chain of mass-market jewellers in the UK, and in 1991 got up on stage in front of a crowd of other businessmen and said:

>We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total c**p.

He then said that earrings the company were selling were as cheap as a prawn sandwich but that the sandwich would probably last longer. It should be said for context that the chain wasn't exactly renowned for quality - people knew that what they were buying wasn't particularly good quality, but Ratner almost appeared to mock his own customers. Customers then ditched the chain en-masse, losing Ratner millions of pounds, and the business almost collapsed. It survives to this day as H Samuel and Ernest Jones.

Here's the speech in full, with the relevant bits at 3:45 and 5:58.

A Philadelphia Pretzel shop opened up in our neighborhood and thought it would be funny to hand out marketing/advertisement papers that looked like Philly parking tickets on one side. So the neighborhood woke up to find their cars littered with tickets and everyone had a meltdown of rage. People stormed over to their car ripping the ticket out of their windshield - only to find it was a joke. The other side was an advert to the new pretzel shop. Man, did that shop get it. Calls, threats, screams - you name it. I don't know how they stayed in business, but it was a rocky start.

And for anyone not familiar with the region, the area this happened in has overly crowded street parking - so people are already SUPER stressed out about parking cars, too limited parking places, etc. Targeting the parking situation was a bad, bad move. Any other joke would have been fun - this nearly incited m*****s.

There was a maintenance place called Dieseltec that wanted to jump on the "we wont serve gays" bandwagon a year or so ago and it blew up miserably.


By the end of it, people had found out that none of the mechanics were licensed, the business wasn't licensed or registered because the owner "doesn't believe he has to", his brother is a registered s*x offender against children, and that he was convicted of beating his wife.


He then trashed his own place, put it online saying "the gay liberals did it" and tries to start 3 separate gofundmes that all got shut down. Oh yeah, he was also illegally using fortune 500 company logos on his displays and claiming to be a licensed dealer for those parts. Then literally all of those companies told him to remove all logos and parts from his stock or else there will be legal actions.



Tryna cash in on dumb bigots, literally f****d his entire business.


Edit: Just decided to peruse their FB page where it all went down while taking a dump, and mysteriously every post related to it has been removed. Gee, I wonder why.

Australia has had Uber here smashing taxis so the taxi guys tried to respond with a twitter campaign #yourtaxis trying to get people to tell their fantastic taxi stories.

It did not go well.

People just flooded it with their terrible taxi stories.

Apple automatically putting U2's new album on everyone's phones.