Top 10 Marketing Blunders of 2008

Yeah, there’s a lot more than 10 here. What can I say? It was a very good year for very bad things.

(PS: If you liked this would you mind going here and voting for it on Digg?)

GRAND PRIZE FOR SUSTAINED ORGANIZATIONAL EFFORT

(tie)

The John McCain Presidential Campaign

• “Our economy, I think, is still — the fundamentals of our economy are strong.”
• Has no idea how many houses he (or his wife) owns.
• Picks Sara Palin, the Broad to Nowhere who couldn’t find Russia or Africa on a map.
• Campaign adviser and former HP CEO Carly Fiorina says Palin couldn’t run a major corporation.
• Campaign adviser and former senator Phil Gramm says Americans are whiners about economic problems.
• “Shutting down” his campaign to fix the bailout.
• “Lipstick on a pig”
• Egregious attack on Dungeons & Dragons that clearly cost him the election. (OK, maybe not so much the last one).

GM

• June: with gas heading to $4-a-gallon, company announces it is trying to sell the Hummer brand. As of today, sale is still pending.
• August: with gas at $4-a-gallon, company announces it will take the bold move of investing “$500 million to build a new fuel-efficient, small car the automaker says will show it can make money in head-to-head competition with its Japanese rivals as it fights to return to profitability.”
• October: Asks Treasury Dept. for $10 billion to pay for proposed merger with Chrysler
• Early November: car company that already isn’t selling cars argues it can’t file for bankruptcy because “people won’t buy cars from a bankrupt car company.”
• Late November: leads troika of Detroit CEOs to DC to ask for taxpayer money to balance the books. Each flies in on wings of attitude and three separate corporate jets.
• December: runs weasel-word mea culpa in Automotive News: “While we’re still the U.S. sales leader, we acknowledge we have disappointed you. At times we violated your trust by letting our quality fall below industry standards and our designs become lackluster. We have proliferated our brands and dealer network to the point where we lost adequate focus on our core U.S. market. We also biased our product mix toward pick-up trucks and SUVs. And, we made commitments to compensation plans that have proven to be unsustainable in today’s globally competitive industry.“

Runners Up

1. Ford features “Space Oddity” — a song about astronaut suicide — in new car campaign.
2. Framingham State College  uses the word blah 137 times in a 312-word fundraising letter.
3. Disney (multiple entries): Bans kids from DisneyWorld restaurant; Changes “It’s A Small World” to “A Salute to All Nations, But Mostly America”; and Sells “High School Musical” panties for tween girls with the phrase “Dive In” on them.
4. Woolworths (UK) launches Lolita brand of beds for young girl
5. JetBlue lives up to Southwest’s parody ad by charging for pillows.
6. Russia uses smiling kids in tourism ad for war zone
7. Residents of Lesbos sue those other lesbians over brand name
8. Motrin gets headache from viral moms video
9. Butcher’s ads feature “Meat Products, Fresh Service” on naked woman
10. Hershey asks if you’ve found Mr. Goodbar

Special Jury Awards

Co-Branding That Shouldn’t Have Been

• Windows Vista toilet paper
• The Muppets appear on DVD for Law & Order: SVU
  
• Barbie® Rice Krispies® Treats
• P&G starts hip-hop record label (Bounce® and Beyonce? Jay Z and Oral B®? 50 Cent and Febreze®? Snoop Dogg and Eukanuba®? Ghostface Killah and Ghost®? Lil Wayne & Pampers®?)

The Alpha & Omega of Over-reaching

• God’s chosen racing team loses at the Indy 500
• “Pope’s Cologne Provides Solace to Grieving Widow”
• “Can Batman Teach Spiritual Truth?”
• Email service lets you taunt friends after The Rapture
• McDonalds compares Ray Kroc to Martin Luther King Jr.

Product Failure

• LifeLock ID protection service fails to protect CEO’s identity
• Anti-shark device found to attract sharks

The Penguins Of Irony “Oh NO You Din’t” Awards

• Publisher says bankruptcy puts magazine chain in “a position poised for wonderful growth
• WaMu continues to send credit card offers after going out of business

Previous years’ lists

• Top 10 from 2007
• Dozen Dumbest Press Releases from 2006
• 10 Dumbest Business Quotes from 2006

Advertisement

Sex, violence and religion: Churches use Halo 3 and porn to attract customers

Everyone else is doing it, so why not them?

The computer game Halo is hot so:

Across the country, hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants have drawn concern and criticism through their use of an unusual recruiting tool: the immersive and violent video game Halo.

Pornography, of course, is always popular so:

The Crux, a Fishers church, joined a nationwide movement Sunday to address the issue, a day they called “Porn Sunday,” WRTV-TV in Indianapolis reported. Across the country, hundreds of churches talked about what some call America’s dirty little secret. An estimated 40 million people visit porn sites daily, generating an estimated $6.2 billion for porn purveyors in the United States alone, according to Porn Sunday’s organizers. Porn Sunday is a movement started by two pastors from California who formed a church called xxxchurch.com, dubbed a Christian porn site.

And to think people once got upset because Vatican II switched the Catholic Church from Latin to the vernacular. (Cue Tom Lehrer.) All of this goes a long way to explain why the Night of Joy Christian music event at Walt Disney World is considered the rowdiest, most debauched event in the Happiest Place on Earth:

. . . some who have attended previous NOJ festivals, as well as Cast Members who’ve worked it, claim that of all the separate-ticket events held at the Magic Kingdom, it’s the most unruly. Tales abound of the Magic Kingdom overrun by mobs of drunken teens, petty thievery in the shops, as well as an overworked security dealing with fights among the crowds of young concert attendees.

(Maybe it’s just the context but doesn’t Night of Joy sound a little dirty?)

It’s actually disingenuous of me to criticize this behavior. I mean if you read the source material … aka The BIBLE … it’s just filled with this stuff.

But that’s all in the Old (fun) Testament, the New Testament’s stories offer far less in the way of how people do act and more in the way of how it is hoped they will act. Because of this I think it’s OK for Catholic Bishops in Belgium to complain about a TV ad depicting a pot-bellied, hippy Jesus performing miracles and picking up scantily-clad girls up in a nightclub.

According to the texts I’ve read (and I haven’t finished The Gnostic Gospels yet) while Jesus did meet “fallen women” he put a premium on helping them back up. It’s important to show the full story.

(Acts of God image courtesy of GreatCosmicHappyAss.com which has a bunch of other funny God cards.)