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JohnT
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Capitalist
Mar 1999
time: 00:27
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Back in the mid-80's, Burger King* came out with a $40 million flop in their "Where's Herb" campaign. First they started by saying that the lucky customer's who spotted Herb would win $5,000. Problem: They didn't let on as to what Herb looked like. Naturally, this resulted in a large numbers of customers (whom apparently fit the "Herb" profile) being harrassed by other customers - "Are you Herb? You sure? You look like him" which started their long sales decline.
Then they revealed, during the Super Bowl nonetheless, that Herb was this geeky looking middle-aged white guy with a widow's peak. Not only that, but the campaign also revealed that Herb had never eaten a Whopper. OK, so this campaign is based upon the predicate that Herb spends all his time at BK, but he doesn't eat the food? 
Then it got really inane. Herb was to go to various BK's around the country, and the first guest to see him would be presented with a check for the aforementioned $5k. They had camera crews ready to catch the moment when some happy BK customer discovered that they had won their five grand.
Except for a minor glitch: on each of his first four visits, Herb was first seen by minors, who were then told that they were not eligible for the $5 grand because of their age. Of course, all these confrontations were filmed, but if BK has any sense they would've destroyed the footage.
The notoriety was so bad that the Alabama State Legislature** passed a resolution accusing BK of consumer fraud in May of 1986, after yet another minor spotted Herb and was told he wasn't getting a check.
2 months and $40 million dollars later, Herb was put to pasture, only to be revived by Advertising Age which voted the "Where's Herb?" campaign the "most elaborate advertising flop of the decade."
*Speaking of BK, you want a sure-fire way to pick out the summers losers? Look at the films that BK has the exclusive fast-food merchandising deal with and you have it.
**Premium content, but you can read the first 100 or so words and get the gist of the article.
Last edited by JohnT on 16-04-2003 at 18:34
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loinburger
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Sweet Sauce Jones
Jul 1999
time: 00:27
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The "Yow, Giant Spider" commercial tops all, but unfortunately I can't find it anywhere in Google.  It was this commercial they ran about ten-odd years ago for some Hot Wheels toys or some other kind of miniature car toy, where these kids are playing some incomprehensible game with the toys. The dialogue (with corresponding shots of these little toy cars being molested by giant spiders or evil bulldozers or human hands or whatever) went something like:
Kid1: "Yow, giant spider!"
Kid2: "Almost got the axe!"
Kid1: "What next?"
Kid2: "Evil bulldozer on the volcano!"
Kid1: "Eat lava, dude!"
At which point the camera cut to a close-up of Kid2 (or maybe Kid1), who lets out a great big "Yeah!"
The truly bizarre thing about the ad is that rather than have Kid1 and Kid2 actually speak their own lines, they apparently had a fortysomething man pretend to speak like a 12-year-old kid and dubbed his voice over the commercial, so that Kid1's voice was indistinguishable from Kid2's, and so that they both sounded like they were a 40-year-old man trying to sound like a 12-year-old kid.
Eventually they changed the ad slightly, so that the kid saying "Yeah!" at the end actually spoke his line. They also reshot the close-up of his face, so he didn't look quite so demonic. The 40-year-old man's voice was still dubbed over the rest of the ad, though.
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Ming
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Some of the worst campaigns can usually be found when companies try to translate their ads to international markets...
Some examples I found on a web site while looking up one of my favorite mistakes, the Chevy Nova campaign in South America 
When General Motors introduced the Chevy Nova in South America, it was apparently unaware that "no va" means "it won't go." After the company figured out why it wasn't selling any cars, it renamed the car in its Spanish markets to the Caribe.
Ford had a similar problem in Brazil when the Pinto flopped. The company found out that Pinto was Brazilian slang for "tiny male genitals". Ford pried all the nameplates off and substituted Corcel, which means horse.
The name Coca-Cola in China was first rendered as Ke-kou-ke-la. Unfortunately, the Coke company did not discover until after thousands of signs had been printed that the phrase means "bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse stuffed with wax" depending on the dialect. Surprisingly enough it didn't sell too well. Coke then researched 40,000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, "ko-kou-ko-le,"which can be loosely translated as "happiness in the mouth."
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."
Also in Chinese, the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan "finger-lickin'good" came out as "eat your fingers off."
The American slogan for Salem cigarettes, "Salem - Feeling Free," got translated in the Japanese market into "When smoking Salem, you feel so refreshed that your mind seems to be free and empty."
When Parker Pen marketed a ballpoint pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to say "It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you." However, the company mistakenly thought the Spanish word "embarazar" meant embarrass. Instead the ads said that "It won't leak in your pocket and make you pregnant."
Chicken-man Frank Perdue's slogan, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," got awfully translated in Mexico. A photo of Perdue with one of his birds appeared on billboards all over Mexico with a caption that explained "It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused."
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MRT144
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Seattle Washington
Oct 2002
time: 21:27
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that is a bad ad campaign
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gunkulator
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"Can you hear me now? Good!"
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gunkulator
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Apologies to this sites owners but:
"The Amazing X10 Cam. Thousands of legitimate uses."
"Congratulations, you are the 3459867298670989267 visitor to this site ...."
"Punch the Monkey"
"Make your ***** larger"
"Free Viagra over the internet"
"Young hot teens are waiting for you..."
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MRT144
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Seattle Washington
Oct 2002
time: 21:27
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Ming, i cant believe a company you worked for had a hand in it.
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16-04-2003 10:40
!
). I don't have the faintest which four Chinese characters with those sounds translate into those phrases.
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