Harsher In Hindsight / Advertising

Made Harsher in Hindsight by Real Life Events

• In 2008, Greyhound unveiled a series of billboard ads with the phrase "There's a reason you've never heard of 'Bus Rage'", mere weeks before passenger Vince Li, in the midst of a psychotic episode, attacked and decapitated fellow passenger Tim McLean aboard a Greyhound bus in Canada.
• WaMu (Washington Mutual Bank) ran ads in the mid-2000s showing that they kept the "stuffy old bankers" penned up where they couldn't get in the way of their innovative financial services, like loans for borrowers that other banks considered risky. Then they folded in the 2008 banking crisis...because of loans to risky borrowers.
• Pretty much any pro-smoking ad or cigarette commercial falls under this after it was revealed smoking is a leading cause of cancer.
  • But some are more egregious in their harshness than others, such as this Camel ad, which stated that more doctors smoke them than other brands.
  • Or the Craven "A" brand, which claimed that it was "Made Specially To Prevent Sore Throats".
• After 2012 Olympic double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius shot and killed his girlfriend, Nike pulled a poster featuring the track star, which contained the tagline: "I am the bullet in the chamber."
• FedEx did a commercial where Steve Irwin (of Crocodile Hunter fame) was bitten by a snake, and croaked because the antivenom wasn't shipped by FedEx and didn't get there. Of course, it wasn't a snake that ultimately killed him^note And also not a crocodile, as many parodies predicted. Instead, it was a stingray., but still...
• You've got to feel a bit disgusted that former British and Australian kids star and convicted paedophile Rolf Harris made a public service announcement warning children about strangers inappropriately touching them in sensitive places.
• There was a TV commercial for Flexon bendable eyeglass frames that showed a metal skyscraper ducking out of the way of an oncoming airplane. The campaign debuted in August 2001. Due to VERY bad timing, this was actually shown on TV a few days after the events of September 11.
• Ernest P. Worrell filmed a PSA warning Vern to quit smoking before "the groundhogs will be bringin' you your mail." His actor Jim Varney's cause of death years later? Lung cancer, thanks to a lifetime of smoking.
• This PSA on an active shooter situation features one of the shooters depicted in a scenario as wearing a skull face mask, combat gear, and wielding an assault rifle. This is exactly what the person who killed 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs would don.
• Nintendo had some touching commercials featuring Robin Williams and his daughter where she asks him if he was mixing her up with the Zelda from the game again. He later killed himself due to a disease that combines Parkinson's and dementia...
• In the 1960s, Humble Oil produced an advertisement boasting that the oil they output each day could melt 7 million tons of glacier. Nowadays, melting glaciers is something oil companies really don't want to be associated with.
• Dutch airline KLM ran print ads prominently featuring one of their pilots, Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten. Shortly afterwards, Veldhuyzen van Zanten was killed in the Tenerife airport disaster, and the main cause of the accident was his attempting to take off without official clearance.
• This 2004 Bush campaign ad ran during the Olympics, celebrating the fact that Afghanistan and Iraq were now free and democratic nations. Needless to say, this didn't age well.
• In 1995, Bill Gates would take part in an ad for Windows 95 that featured him wearing a trenchcoat and blasting demons with a shotgun in Doom, even ending with a tagline under the Microsoft logo that says "Who do you want to execute today?". Everything about this would become a lot more uncomfortable following the Columbine massacre, the killers having been fans of Doom, wearing trenchcoats, and wielding shotguns.
• In early 2020 Italian TV channels aired an ad featuring the mascot of Crodino (a popular non-alcoholic drink), a talking gorilla. The gorilla said that people should re-learn to socialize the old-fashioned way, i.e. being more physical, hugging each other and going to the bar to drink Crodino and talk in-person instead of behind a screen. It was likely supposed to be an answer to the increase of hate speech and trolling that ruined online communities and was spreading to the physical space too. Unfortunately, it aired exactly when Italy became the first Western country to suffer the catastrophic effects of the Coronavirus pandemic: people had to quickly learn the art of social distancing and had to rely much more than before on technology to keep in touch. So, the gorilla's well-intentioned message became immediately outdated and even counter-productive and dangerous, and the ad was quickly pulled from circulation. To add insult to injury, the long version of the ad (linked above) featured people all over the world hugging and kissing each other.
• Ads for Schlitterbahn water park in Kansas City. One had singing about making memories with family and having fun. The park’s record setting Verruckt water slide was prominent in one shot in the ad. Then, in 2016, a 10 year old boy died when the raft he was in on the slide went airborne and he was decapitated. The park operators were found to have been negligent in designing the ride.
• Comedian Enrique San Francisco's last work before passing away in March 2021 (merely nine days before what would have been his 66th birthday) was the 2020 Christmas advert for food company Campofrío... in which he played Death itself.
• A 1978 commercial for the US Olympic committee encourages donations to help aid US swimmers in training for the Moscow Olympics. After the invasion of Afghanistan a year later, the US would boycott the games.
• Domino's Pizza had a hit advertising campaign on its hands with The Noid, a claymation character created by Will Vinton Studios, the same company that created the California Raisins. The Noid, a manic character in a red suit with a rabbit-ear hood, was a personification of all of the possible things that could befall a pizza during delivery, such as cold pizza or the pizza getting crushed, while Domino's promised that their delivery drivers would help you "avoid the Noid!" by delivering a hot, fresh pizza to your door in 30 minutes or less. It even got its own video game from Capcom. Unfortunately, in 1989, Kenneth Lamar Noid, a man suffering with a number of mental illnesses, entered a Georgia Domino's with a gun and took several staff members hostage, claiming that Domino's had stolen his name for the Noid. He later surrendered to police and was found not guilty of kidnapping by reason of insanity, but went on to commit suicide in 1995. At that time, Domino's quietly discontinued the Noid character, though they insisted that the discontinuation had nothing to do with Mr. Noid's suicide when they were asked about it. However, in the 2010s, Domino began phasing the Noid back in through brief appearances before bringing him back in 2021.
• Ronald McDonald, the longtime clown mascot of McDonald's, was much less prominent after the 2016 clown sightings, which led to many places banning clown costumes and masks out of fears of violence. However, Ronald had attracted some controversy well before that for marketing unhealthy fast food to children as concerns about childhood obesity have grown. Most of the other McDonaldland characters had already been phased out. His name still adorns McDonald's children's charity, Ronald McDonald House.
• The commercials for the Ayds appetite-suppressant candy (which, yes, died slowly during the 1980s because of the rise of AIDS combined with its unfortunately similar name. Back then the disease was called "GRID", short for Gay-Related Immune Deficiency before it was renamed in the '80s).
  "Thank goodness for Ayds!"
  "Why take diet pills when you can enjoy Ayds?"
• In 1997, Sarah Ferguson appeared in a commercial for Weight Watchers where she was being hounded by reporters, and she says, "Losing weight can be harder than outrunning the paparazzi!" A few weeks later, her sister-in-law Diana (former Princess of Wales) had a run-in with the paparazzi that ended poorly.
• Toyota's slogan "Moving Forward" has become a lot more uncomfortable ever since the 2010 recalls, since people have reported that their Toyota vehicles accelerate suddenly and uncontrollably, and don't respond to the driver pressing the brake pedal.
• There used to be a chain called Chapter 11 Bookstores with the motto "Prices so low, you'd think we were going bankrupt!". Which, yes, they later did.
• There was a funny commercial in 2008 where Chavs are destroying Britain and a family takes shelter to watch TV without any worries. Fast forward to 6 August 2011, and the ULondon tragedy, and this isn't a laughing matter anymore.
• In late 2011, one of the ads in the long-running Ashton Kutcher Nikon Coolpix campaign featured the man using his camera to seduce a bunch of women and lead them up to his hotel room. Around that same time, his marriage to Demi Moore was dissolving thanks to a very public affair.
• Mattel Electronics' commercial for BurgerTime, which ends with Mr. Hot Dog saying "We are closed now!" as he slams the window shut on the drive-thru, came out months before Mattel Electronics closed down. For that reason, the programmers quoted the line extensively that day.
• Apple's '1984' advert, depicting IBM as a 1984-esque Big Brother figure, while these days, Apple are HUGE champions of Digital Restrictions Management and locking down devices so users can't use devices they own to their full capability. In addition, Apple banned The Best Page in the Universe from being viewable from Apple Stores and on Apple offices' networks, which Maddox speculates was due to his anti-iPhone page.
  "Yes, the company that once alluded to an Orwellian future with controlled media, is now controlling media."
• Commercials for Breyers ice cream used to feature kids having trouble reading the ingredient labels of competitors, struggling to pronounce things like "polysorbate 80" and "mono and diglycerides", but can easily read the much simpler list of Breyers' ingredients containing things like milk and natural vanilla. However, Unilever has been cutting costs in the brand, so it features those same ingredients nowadays and is even marketed as "frozen dairy dessert" due to the use of the cheaper skim milk and whey (a byproduct of cheese) instead of whole milk and cream.
• A 2010 ESPN "This is Sportscenter" ad featured mild-mannered Dwight Howard getting the story on how Superman saved Hannah Storm from a coffee machine that caught on fire (the joke, of course, being that Superman is Dwight Howard's alter ego). In December 2012, Storm received severe facial and upper body burns after a gas grill's propane tank exploded in her face.
• Subway had a mobile game called Jared's Pants Dance marketed for kids, which becomes a very unfortunate name in light of Subway's promoter, Jared Fogle's convictions of child pornography possession and sexual abuse of minors.
  • There was also a commercial that had Jared in court. You can't make this stuff up.
• A 1996 Snickers commercial shows a football player taking a big hit and subsequently thinking he is Batman. Pretty funny at the time, but since then there have been a ton of studies and examples of the damage that can be done to players of all types of football by repeated head injuries.
• This Iran Air spot from 1978 (third spot in compilation) fits taking into account considering the Iranian Revolution the following year and especially the Iran Hostage Crisis that began in November 1979.
• Verizon FiOS began airing a series of ads in which a fictional network had to choose whether to send former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback and real-life FOX sportscaster Terry Bradshaw and a little girl. The girl gets the information in real time (using FiOS, of course) and gets the call; forcing Terry to watch at home. The spot took a swerve when Bradshaw was unable to go to Super Bowl XLVIII because his father had died.
• This eerily ironic Driving PSA with James Dean from The '50s. Keep in mind, in the same decade, James Dean died in a car accident.
• Ikea furniture names were always fun due to In My Language, That Sounds Like..., but when the dresser "Malm", which in German means "crush", is responsible for killing several small children by keeling over, it doesn't work as a joke anymore.
• In 1968, London Weekend Television was due to start broadcasting. During the final weekend of their predecessor ATV London's broadcast, they ran a short trailer with a letter giving a positive review of the programming for the upcoming first weekend. The announcer noted that the letter "seem(ed) a bit premature", and indeed it was — the first weekend (and several more afterward) ended up being wiped out by strike action.
• A 2000 Super Bowl ad has a presenter who mentions how "in 2004, the tide was turned against AIDS", in 2006 ("two years later", according to the ad), there were "great strides against cancer, and most notably, a "remarkable breakthrough against spinal cord injuries", which featured the CG-enhanced Christopher Reeve walking onstage. Sadly, Reeve would die in 2004, as would his wife Dana from lung cancer (despite being a non-smoker) in 2006, and we haven't seen so much progress in all those areas.
• A 2009 commercial for the MTV Video Music Awards features Taylor Swift singing about the 2009 VMAs and how good it will be, including the line "There'll be no teardrops on my guitar." At the actual show, Kanye West hijacked the microphone from Taylor Swift during her acceptance speech so that he could rep Beyonce. Swift was reportedly reduced to tears after the incident.
• A 1981 commercial for Raintree Hand & Body Lotion featured Natalie Wood saying "If I were you, Raintree's the last hand lotion I'd ever try", as well as making other statements to that effect. The commercial aired frequently throughout November of 1981 — up to and including November 29, the day Wood fell off her yacht near Catalina Island and drowned. As a result, her statement in the commercial — likely the last she ever filmed — was given an unfortunate new meaning.^note One station had the misfortune to air the commercial multiple times on the day of her death, and wasn't notified of her passing until they received dozens of angry calls from viewers berating them for their (accidental) insensitivity.
• In 1999, Sunny Delight ran a Christmas commercial in the UK depicting a snowman turning orange. The ad wound up airing the same week as news reports about a girl whose skin became yellow after drinking Sunny D several times a day; it didn't help the drink had already come under fire for exaggerating its health benefits.
• The CDC's "Tips From Former Smokers" ads are subject to an interesting example of this. It happens whenever the person telling their story dies from what they're speaking out about, but unlike most other examples of this trope, it actually adds to the value of their story. Terrie Hall's commercials are particularly noteworthy examples of this.
• This advert for the failed YouChew forums reboot, particularly when it says "You might think this community will become a warzone. Because of that, the rebrand will be dead in a few days." Which is precisely what happened. Far from coming back stronger as the advert asserts, the failure of the reboot would not only kill any chance of the YouChew brand name making a return, but also wipe its entire 13-year legacy off the internet.
• A 1967 jingle for Aunt Jemima pancakes and syrup sang that the only thing worse than eating the pancakes without the syrup would be "no Aunt Jemima's at all." In 2021, Quaker announced plans to rebrand Aunt Jemima pancakes and syrup under the name "Pearl Milling Company", in the wake of protests against police brutality towards African-Americans, to remove any reference to Mammy stereotypes.
• A series of 2009-2010 Target commercials starred Maria Bamford as a crazy woman who was so obsessed with Target's Christmas sale that she was unable to sleep and dedicated all her time to planning for the sale. The next year, Bamford suffered several nervous breakdowns related to her bipolar disorder, so it's quite awkward to see her play a character who's comically depicted as manic. Bamford would represent this experience in Lady Dynamite when her character does a similar campaign for Checklist, a fictionalized Target, with the fictional Bamford's mental health issues more obviously affecting the commercials.
• A 1936 ad◊ for Cine Kodak movie cameras had the tagline "Moments that make history - Get them with a movie camera" next to a picture of The Hindenburg. A Cine Kodak camera would be one of the cameras that captured footage of the Hindenburg's explosion and crash.
• A particularly horrifying example is this 1996 AT&T commercial, where it celebrates the then-ongoing 1996 Atlanta Olympics by having a pole vaulter vault over....the World Trade Center. Featuring various shots of him falling to the ground, albeit fortunately onto a safety mat.
• The 1993 Jack in the Box "Monster Burger" promotion ran with the tagline "So Good, it's Scary!"◊ The high demand for the burger became legitimately scary when it led to a massive outbreak of E. coli, killing four children and leaving over a hundred others with permanent damage.
• For the 2020 Olympic Games, a Brazilian bank made an ad where local surfer Gabriel Medina goes after Poseidon so the sea would get waves good enough to surf. Once the Olympic surfing competition came, people were thinking that it was not good to see in every commercial break a reminder of a medal favorite who couldn't go right - along with the judges not giving Medina good enough grades while rating similar tricks by opponents much higher, the lost bronze medal match had Medina struggling to get waves (leading to jokes about false advertising and how inappropriate the ad's first line "When there's no waves, there's no way" became).
• Kelloggs Yogos Bits candy was once advertised with the slogan “A taste you’ll love so much, you’ll hate when it’s gone” (as in, when you’ve eaten it all). Since it’s been discontinued, many 2000s kids can attest to that.
• For years Codral has effectively encouraged Australian people to "soldier on", which meant "doping yourself up on over-the-counter codeine and marching straight to work no matter how sick you are". Amazingly, some eyebrows were raised even then about that terrible message, but the naysayers were mostly ignored (Codral was the market leader)... until COVID-19, when Codral was finally forced to retire their famous jingle, sideline "Soldier on" in favor of "Own Your Cold" (seemingly unwilling to let the familiar slogan disappear completely, they still use it in ads, but in the context of staying at home, treating your flu, and only then soldiering on), and make some adjustments to the formula.
• A 2022 Super Bowl ad for the FTX crypto exchange featured Larry David naysaying famous inventions throughout history before declining to invest in FTX. At the end of that same year, FTX collapsed, and the real Larry David, who had actually endorsed it, was one of several celebrities sued by irate investors. Needless to say, the ad's tagline, "Don't Be Larry", has a very different meaning now.
• In 2015, The Salvation Army of South Africa put out an ad against domestic abuse against women by using the black and blue or white and gold meme dress. This becomes very disturbing when in 2023, Keir Johnston, the man who made the meme, was charged with trying to kill his wife and that he abused her for years.