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.
Ads and packaging make stuff look like it's gonna be fantastic. I mean, sure it's the job of a commercial to make a burger look like the be-all-end-all of burgerdom. But when what you get is so different from what was advertised, you can't help but feel like you've been had. Here are some times when reality got the best of people's expectations.
Some of these are kind of cool. Some of these are a little shocking. Some of them are gross. Some of them are straight-up weird. Post World War II America was a place of seemingly endless prosperity. How this attitude resulted with ads for putting Mayo on pears and putting chow mein in a can, we'll never know. The snapshot of the past is interesting enough, especially with some of the stuff here that never caught on.
If you had any doubts as to whether you were good at your job or not, then have no fear. These failures are examples of someone else's amazing mistakes. So be glad you aren't the dude who put some stairs in upside down or made your storefront inexplicably filthy. People do this a lot.
This is either terrible or great marketing, we're really not sure. Everybody's looking at the ad, but we're pretty sure not too many people are buying the tightest shirt to every squeeze onto an Asgardian. We're big fans of when facebook gets ahold of something, like that time that guy with the huge neck got destroyed by everyone.
The people who make bathtub trays seem to be under the impression that the people who buy them are in search of a lifestyle of elegance. Sharon Su investigates this incredible phenomenon in the thread below. Also, it looks like they used the blue drink twice. Huh.
What happens when people don't review their work? Misplaced toilets, stairs to nowhere and advertisements that look like living nightmares. Some of this stuff was planned, but still turned out to be crap anyway! And boy are we glad it happens.
The truth is, this stuff is child's play. Here's some darker and dirtier design fails to really get your motor running.
András Arató, the face behind the classic memes, has had a resurgence in popularity over the last few years as people have gotten to know the real him. Recently he was featured in a Helpline advertisement in Hungary, where he lives. Even without knowing the language, his performance pretty touching. It goes to show how universally relatable the guy is.
