Unfortunate Implications / Advertising

Please remember to cite your sources so we have proof it's not just one person's thinking! Citations are done as follows:

• Blah Story Blah Blah Circumstance Blah Blah Implication Blah. Example Website

• The citation needs to record the opinions of several people; a citation that mentions only one person isn't enough.
• The citation should be in a reputable source. We'd prefer you cite something a bit more formal than someone's Tumblr blog. Anyone can write a blog post and then call it a "citation".
• Also, citations stuck behind paywalls or mandatory logins don't count. If people can't see your proof, then it doesn't prove much.

Keep in mind that Unfortunate Implications are unintentional. An intended offensive message (for example, a piece of Axis propaganda about Jews) does not belong here, nor does natter about the author's true intentions.

---

• It's been noted several times that even clothing brands that market to plus-sized people tend to use extremely thin models to show their clothes, which has several effects: First, plus-sized clothing on your typical model looks enormous, since it is not meant for their body type, meaning that the people who want to order it are unsure what it will look like on them, and it further stigmatizes plus-sized people because it implies that no-one will want to look at them, not even other plus-sized people looking for clothing that will fit them. Several companies have caught on and now consciously try to avert this, including Kiyonna, which honestly makes an effort to have its models be people who would actually wear their clothing in their everyday lives. Even plus-size (if you will) models are altered, which can seem unnatural, but it's more noticeable here.
• A series of Huggies billboards advertising diapers in a denim jean pattern had images of babies posing or strutting with the intention of looking "sexy" and taglines such as "Work it baby!" and "My diaper is full of... CHIC!". After it caught a lot of flak, for allegedly sexualizing minors, it got banned, despite being edited twice.
• UK mobile phone retailer "Phones4U" embarked on an advertising campaign where they show a particular group of people (scoutmasters, yo-yo specialists) then claim that their phone rates would be wasted on such people because they have no friends (unlike their target demographic, one would assume). Said groups weren't amused.
• An ad campaign from The Economist aimed at women used its traditional brand of quirky humor when it said on the front, "Why should women read The Economist? They shouldn't." Then, on the inside, it said "Accomplished and intelligent people should read it." Even some women who made it to the punchline on the inside got offended, taking it to mean that a female point of view (the magazine's staff is mostly male) was invalid.
• Complaints were brought against a 2012 campaign in Atlanta, GA that used such slogans as "It's hard to be a little girl if you're not." Childhood obesity is a genuine problem in the U.S., but so far it seems to be an impossible one to sensitively address.
• Commentators picked up on misogyny as one of the predominant themes of the 2010 Super Bowl ad crop. 2011 and 2012 weren't much better. In fact, there was a Twitter hashtag (#NotBuyingIt) in anticipation of the rampant misogyny, with the "woman is actually a car" Fiat ad receiving the brunt of it.
• In the UK, Persil ran an ad which showed (among similar images) a dalmatian shaking off its black spots and a white horse breaking away from a group of black horses. There was a small-scale press outcry after viewer complaints that these were racist metaphors, but after a formal investigation by a regulatory body, the complaints weren't upheld.
• Cravendale had an advert in which an angry bull's black patches are removed, leaving it white and "pure". There were plenty of complaints, though the Advertising Standards Authority ultimately deemed it "unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence".
• The Metropolitan Police in London have come under fire for several campaigns encouraging the public to report terrorism, suggesting that the most innocuous of activities could be a possible sign of a terrorist. In particular, one radio ad was banned for implying that closing curtains or not speaking to neighbours is suspicious enough activity to merit reporting someone to the police.
• An anti-drinking PSA aired in New Zealand showed a woman getting progressively more drunk on a night out and dancing with a stranger who grabs her and drags her into an alleyway. The ad received a number of complaints that it implied that being abducted/presumably raped was her own fault, and encouraged Victim-Blaming.
• Pepsi: An ad was made and then subsequently pulled for Mountain Dew that involved a white woman attempting to pick the person who had assaulted her out of a line-up that consisted of a group of young black males and a goat. Even leaving the aside the question of what anything in this scenario had to do with Mountain Dew, the ad implied that white people cannot tell the difference between a black man and a goat. The fact that it played heavily on racist stereotypes and violence against women as well as it all being Played for Laughs didn't help matters.
• A commercial for Samsung's Smart TV shows a caveman-like guy watching The Croods and acting like an imbecile while his wife upgrades the TV through an "evolutionary kit" box. She then fantasizes about using the box on her husband, transforming him into a handsome man who does all the chores for her and sets up a dinner date for her (at which point she is brought back to reality by her real husband farting loudly). The implications that Women Are Wiser and that men who don't toil away for their significant others are neanderthals were not lost on commentators.
• An ill-conceived internet flyer◊ from IKEA, the furniture store, demonizing goths as "creepy" and a "bad influence" didn't go down too well with the subculture. Several gothic commentators pointed out that IKEA had managed to offend a group who actually like a lot of their products and were unhappy with IKEA perpetuating negative stereotypes of goths.
• Some of the Meth Project ads, which pointedly use frightening, extreme imagery to make their point, have a noted tendency to have some of the more problematic ads imply that meth addiction causes middle-class kids to become homeless and straight kids to turn gay, and that linking these things are designed to attach the shame and stigma of being gay or poor to being a meth addict. The reality is that impoverished people as well as gay people already are the groups with the highest risk of meth addiction, particularly in the northern and midwestern United States. Supporters have pointed out that the poor and gay characters in the ads are depicting a realistic example, and it's only the audience who assumes that they weren't poor or gay to begin with, but most of them depict at least upper-middle-class teenagers, often girls, from good families, and the ads that reference male homosexuality depict it as predatory and abusive.
• In 2011, Israel's Ministry of Immigrant Absorption released a series of ads targeting Israeli expatriates in America to encourage them to return home. They depicted Jewish Americans as ignorant of Jewish history and culture, while their patient and intelligent Israeli partners or family members struggled in vain to educate them. The ads seemed to imply that Israeli Jews are the only "real" Jews, that the world outside Israel is a godless wasteland, and that American or secular Jews (or Americans of any type, for that matter) are dumb and will lead Israelis astray. Needless to say, many Jewish Americans found this deeply insulting and the ads were pulled. Might also be a case of You Are What You Hate, since many of the earliest official Israeli citizens were American-born.
• In the mid-nineties, Reebok came under fire for producing a shoe called the Incubus — a shoe marketed to women, no less. Apparently, someone in marketing submitted it as a potential name because it was a non-trademarked word that sounded cool, and the company didn't do the research that would have revealed that they were about to sell a women's athletic shoe named after male demons of seduction. The company quickly apologized and recalled the product when this came to their attention.
• The "Add a Kid" line of kids' clothing attracted some controversy: the main premise of the line is that there is a picture of a headless character printed on the shirt so that when a kid wears it, it looks like his or her head is on the character's body. In order to illustrate this, the shirts had cardboard cutouts that had photos of kids printed on them while in stores. The controversy occurred when one of the shirts with a monkey's body was paired with an African-American child, unintentionally referencing the "black people are monkeys" stereotype.
  • A similar controversy arose when H&M used a black child to model a sweatshirt that read "Coolest Monkey in the Jungle."
• A 2015 Coca-Cola Christmas ad came heavily under fire for this. In it, a group of white teens are seen traveling to an indigenous Mexican village with the intention of spreading Christmas joy; they give away bottles of Coke to the sad-looking natives and build them a Christmas tree made out of soda bottles. The ad was widely panned for its White Man's Burden theme and was immediately pulled.
• The 2015 Bloomingdale's Christmas Catalog advised readers to "Spike your best friend’s eggnog when they’re not looking." While the line was likely meant to refer to slipping a bit of alcohol in the eggnog (which still raises issues with consent), the line coupled with the image of a man staring intently at a woman who doesn't appear to notice him caused many people to interpret it as making light of, or even going as far as encouraging, Date Rape. Bloomingdale subsequently apologized for the gaffe but was unable to pull it, as all copies of the print catalog had already been sent out.
• An In-Universe variant of this happens in Mad Men where Don Draper's Hawaii ad unintentionally invokes the idea of Hawaii as a suicide destination, which his colleagues and the client have to point out.
• The Nostalgia Critic has a series of videos where he reviews old commercials. One of these features a Toys-R-Us ad from 1996. It showcases kids from an older ad and then shows them 20 years older. The unfortunate implication here is that these people never did grow up.
• The Red Cross issued an apology when a pool safety poster showed the lighter-toned characters acting safely and following the rules, while the ones painted with darker skin tones were the ones breaking the rules.
• A series of blood donation PSAs talked about people who tried to do something about a social issue, only for it to go horribly wrong and end up exacerbating the problem. E.g. a man discovers his letter-writing campaign about sweatshops has led to increased use of child labor and deforestation from all the paper; or an activist takes down a company that was polluting a town and making people sick, but now the whole town is unemployed and no one has health insurance. The message was that giving blood is a much simpler way of doing good. These PSAs attracted some criticism for implying that social activism is a waste of time and only makes things worse.
• A Pepsi ad from early 2017 shows a group of young people protesting over social issues and walking towards a line of police officers. Kendall Jenner, who is modeling nearby, decides to join the protest and offers a Pepsi to one of the police officers, eliciting a roar of applause from the protesters and apparently mending relations. Despite its intended message about peace, the ad was widely panned and pulled from television due to co-opting the very serious and controversial-at-the-time issue of police brutality and their protests to simply sell a product. Also rather disliked was the fact that rich, white, and privileged Kendall Jenner is the one to mend issues, while police brutality frequently targets poor and underprivileged minorities. This was on top of the simple fact that the ad was sickening and rather childish Glurge from the premise alone.
• Bud Light's infamous "remove no from your vocabulary" ad campaign was widely criticized for sounding an awful lot like it was making light of rape. While "removing no from your vocabulary" was intended to mean that the drinker would have more bravery to ask someone out, it instead brought up implications of intoxicating a person and removing their ability to withhold consent to sex (legally, an intoxicated person cannot give consent to having sex, so anyone who has sex with them is essentially raping them).
• In October 2017, Kellogg's "Corn Pops" cereal featured a game in the back of the box where the point was to find certain yellow corn pop characters doing a specific, silly activity, a-la Where's Waldo? Kellogg's then issued an apology when DC Comics artist Saladin Ahmed noticed that the only brown corn pop character in the illustration was working as a janitor.
• Heineken had to pull an ad after it got accused of racism. In it, we see a bottle of beer being passed among several dark-skinned arms until it stops on a white woman and it shows the tagline "Sometimes lighter is better".
• Soap brand Dove has managed to twice show black women becoming white after using their product.
• Similarly to the Dove example, a Chinese detergent company got themselves in hot water with a commercial where a black guy is flirting with a Chinese woman, who stuffs a laundry tablet into his mouth and shoves him into a washing machine, whereupon he emerges as a clean, well-dressed Chinese man.
• During the 1993 Canadian elections, the Progressive Conservative Party produced an attack ad (now known as the "face ad"), showing unflattering still close-ups of Liberal leader Jean Chrétien's face while questioning whether he is fit for the position of Prime Minister. Since Chrétien has Bell's palsy, which causes facial deformity, the ad was easy to interpret as mocking his condition. Wikipedia has an article about the controversy caused by the ad, which was met with enormous backlash, contributing to a landslide victory for the Liberals and a crushing defeat for the Tories.
• An advert by Sofitel in Brisbane showed a man and a woman enjoying breakfast in bed, with the man reading the Financial Review while the woman reads a Chanel coffee table book. The advert has come under fire for implying that women only care about looking at fashion and don't care about finance.
• Yet another advertisement using highly questionable metaphors to represent a white/black dichotomy: a Dutch billboard for the PlayStation Portable White featuring a white model violently grabbing a black model's face. Sony apologized and pulled the ad in the midst of the backlash. Guru Larry talks about it in his Fact Hunt episode on disastrous PlayStation marketing.
• A crowdfunding campaign by Michael Jackson fans angered by the documentary Leaving Neverland bought ads on London Transport buses and at bus stops defending him against the child molestation allegations leveled against him in the documentary with the slogan "Facts don't lie. People do." When The Survivors Trust charity pointed out that the campaign could discourage survivors of abuse from coming forward for fear of being called liars, London Transport pulled all of the ads.
• Nationwide aired this commercial during the 2015 Super Bowl, about a boy who won't be able to experience growing up because he died in an unidentified home accident. The backlash that ensued accused Nationwide of exploiting the lives of children to sell insurance and its commercial for being too depressing, and it never aired again.
• Dodge drew controversy from The King Center and other civil rights groups for a 2018 Super Bowl Ad. They disavowed commercializing his anti-racism message when one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s audio speeches was used to advertise the RAM truck.
• The 2019 Peloton holiday commercial, in which a husband buys a stationary workout bike from the brand for his wife as a Christmas present, has been widely criticised as sexist due to the implications of the patronizing mindset from the husband that the woman in the ad needs to lose weight in order to keep being attractive. The backlash also spawned numerous parodies and a "sequel" in the form of a Aviation Gin commercial in which a woman played by the same actress (and implied to be the same as the one in the Peloton ad) has split from her husband because of this.
• An advert for Hyundai's ix35 FCEV variant of the Tucson SUV has a depressed man attempt to gas himself in his garage, only for his effort to remain futile as the emissions produced by the vehicle are innocuous enough not to kill a person, which was supposedly the main point of the ad, i.e. promote the hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicle as having zero harmful emissions. It didn't take long for the Korean carmaker to be harshly criticised for condoning self-harm and suicide methods, with one blogger writing an open letter describing how the commercial reminded her of her father ending his own life in much the same way. Hyundai later apologised and took down the ad following pressure from advocacy groups.
• The Apple and CinnaMon Apple Jacks campaign featured the antagonistic Apple trying to flavor the Apple Jacks cereal before the carefree CinnaMon character. This campaign faced some backlash from certain non-profit groups for possibly discouraging children from eating fruit by suggesting Apple Jacks was superior to the taste of natural apples. This may be why later ads depicted Apple and CinnaMon as friendly rivals and eventually just best friends.
• Bacardi Breezers launched a promotional site aimed at women encouraging them to "Get an Ugly Girlfriend!" to hang around to look more attractive by comparison. Women who looked like the "ugly girlfriends" (who were mostly just mocked for being fat) didn't appreciate the ads.
• A print ad for Flora margarine featured a bullet made of the words "Uhh dad I'm gay" hurtling towards a heart made of porcelain, with the tagline "You need a strong heart today." Backlash quickly followed for comparing having a gay child to being shot in the heart, and Unilever (which owns Flora) quickly apologized and pulled the ad, claiming the ad came from an external South African agency and was not approved by the company.
• Renault UK had to pull a print ad reading, "For 10 days, we can't use the 'N' word." due to complaints about the racist connotations of the phrase "'N' word." The actual meaning of "'N' word" in the ad is the word "no," as part of a deal where Renault employees could not say "no" to customers.
• An ad campaign for Pretzel Crisp proclaimed, "You can never be too thin." It was referring to the thin shape of its pretzels, but was compared to slogans used in pro-anorexic communities. The company attempted to defend itself (mentioning they wanted an "attention grabbing ad," but didn't want to promote eating disorders), but soon replaced the slogan with "Tastes as good as skinny feels," which didn't dissuade backlash. The ads were eventually removed altogether.
• During the 2012 Summer Olympics, NBC aired a commercial for their sitcom Animal Practice which depicted a monkey doing gymnastics. Seems innocent enough... except the ad aired right after African-American gymnast Gabby Douglas scored her Olympic win, prompting backlash due to the unfortunate timing associating a black gymnast with a monkey gymnast.
• A German commercial for Fanta cola's 75th anniversary in 2015, which takes the audience back to the "good old times" and tells the story of Fanta's conception, was pulled because it glossed over that Fanta was created in Germany during World War II due to trade embargo limiting the amount of syrup available to make Coca-Cola. In other words, the "good old times" described in the ad was the reign of Nazi Germany.
• In this Ancestry.com ad set during the 19th century, a white man proposes to a Black woman and urges her to "escape to the North" with him. The ad was criticized for promoting a white savior narrative and ignoring the reason why many Black Americans have white ancestors.
• Ferrero advertised their white chocolate Küsschen by depicting German crowds celebrating white chocolate, parodying Barack Obama's "Yes We Can" slogan with phrases like "Yes Weiss Can." It ends with a poster declaring, "Germany Votes White." The backlash erupted when people pointed out that it wasn't very clearly about white chocolate, and the slogans were eerily similar to those used by neo-Nazis.
• An Indiana-based Tex-Mex restaurant chain called Hacienda has gotten heat quite a few times for ill-conceived marketing campaigns:
  • Their first blunder was putting a chicken coop on a promotional vehicle. That was swiftly removed after at least one resident complained about it stereotyping Mexican culture.
  • In 2006, they ran an advertising campaign that put up billboards◊ depicting a dwarf in a sombrero with the tagline "Take home a little Mexican". The ads were quickly pulled after critics complained about the stereotypical depiction of Hispanics and how it disrespectfully portrayed them as Funny Foreigners.
  • In 2011, they posted billboards◊ proclaiming "We're like a cult with better Kool-Aid" over a cocktail labeled "To die for!". Needless to say, people were not happy about how the restaurant trivialized the Jonestown Massacre. The billboards were quickly pulled after complaints.
  • In 2016, the restaurant posted billboards with the slogan "The best Mexican food this side of the wall", referencing the US-Mexico wall that President Trump had proposed. The Latino community in particular found it offensive and demeaning.
• The rental company Vrbo was harshly criticized in Canada over a Super Bowl LVIII commercial that uses the traditional Newfoundland folk song "I's the B'y" during a scene where people arrive at a vacation rental out of a farmhouse with various kinds of animals living in the amenities, implying that Newfoundland is a backwards rural area populated by Half-Witted Hillbillies. The government demanded that the commercial be pulled, and Vrbo eventually apologized for it.

---