Most people who grew up in the 80s and 90s remember the peculiar angular pastel interior of a fast food place, the lawlessness of a McDonald's play place, the absolute need to get a specific happy meal toy, and the peculiar flavor of Hi-C orange drink. What a weird time. If this gets your nostalgia motot running, here's some 90s nostalgia from simpler times.
ads
You wouldn't think that cartoonish scams like selling a sandwich with one slim front-facing strip of meat would still exist these days, but for some reason the practice of misleading products is going strong. Here are products designed by monsters that sell something other than advertised, charge people for BS, or have misleading interfaces.
Signs, advertisements and billboards are a weird game. Every joke advertisement is a bit of a risk. Some are dumber than others. Sometimes a sign's pun game is simply too strong. Some advertising fails, like the magazine layout fails are total accidents. Sometimes signs are just straight up scary.
We like to think there's some set of rigid standards that applies to all products and advertising, but the reality is that most companies will just do whatever they can get away with. That leads to some devious and horrible products designed to manipulate people. Seriously, a lot of products are designed by jerks.
Ideally, the buyer/seller relationship should be one where upfront sellers provide a valuable product or service to people who are happy to pay for it. This is often not the case. In reality it can be a one-sided war between companies and consumers, with companies trying every underhanded tactic they can come up with to inconvenience, scare and manipulate their own customers into overpaying for horrible products. Seriously, these products and ads were designed by jerks.
Is this good or bad marketing? Does anyone even know anymore? On the one hand, it's an utterly ridiculous slogan. On the other hand, it sure seems to be getting the word out.
Via Tom Darbyshire
The 90s were a strange time. In this case, a 1998 pizza ad that featured the former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. This article on the Gorbachev Pizza Hut Adstates that he needed the money for a foundation, and it was the only high profile commercial offer he took.
The world is rife with manipulative and awful products and ads, and it's worth it to point them out when they're clearly unfair. There's wildly misleading labels, sandwiches made to look like they're twice as big as they actually are, and apps that make you pay money to delete them, just to name a few. It makes you start to think this stuff could be designed by the devil.
Soulless people will do anything to make a quick buck. They'll make uncomfortable standing airline seats to save on space, charge people to go to the bathroom, advertise a cheap product and charge a hundred dollars for shipping, literally hide fine print by making it the same color as the background, and do even more devious BS when they think of it. These are examples of deceptive and crappy products. Like seriously, these were designed by the devil.
You may have seen sponsored ads for random doodads in your various feeds from time to time. Since online stores will sell everything and anything, people find themselves seeing ads for stuff that you uh.. normally wouldn't see ads for. Not just sex stuff, but strange products with almost no discernable use, or at least something that seems like a very questionable purchase for 3 dollars. The world of online shopping can be strange, with people dropping creative reviews for stuff like massagers, or funny reviews for just about anything else.
These honest slogans do away with the deception that brands put out when it comes to marketing, and instead just get right to the damn point. Sometimes you had a hell of a day, and just need to take a pint of Ben & Jerry's home with you, to eat your feelings away.
Companies that use bait-and-switch tactics, ridiculous hidden fees and stupid fine print seem like something of the norm these days. These ones are some of the most unfair and stupid of the bunch. For more deceptive and unfair products, check out these misleading and awful products designed by monsters
Whether it's a lie promoted from a government in wartime, or a company trying to to sell more product, there are some falsehoods people live with that are a direct result of very persuasive marketing. But hey, it's good to learn why we think the things we think. On a lighter note, here are fake facts people believed for WAY too long.
We don't know what you do at your job but we can guess that you don't have ads up everywhere insinuating that you steal children and eat them or something. People seem to have a really hard time proofreading. And we're grateful for it. Here are some more weird failures of design.
