55 Of The Worst PR Mistakes That Backfired And People Still Remember Them

Americas 'president' right now.

Pepsi's contest in the Philippines in 1992. You can read about it here. Pepsi ran a contest in the Philippines that would give a lucky winner $1 million. It was based on the number on the bottle cap and the winner would be announced. Well it turned out there was a glitch and the number they announced was not a unique number, in fact, there were 800,000 caps that had that number. Pepsi retracted the winning number and a riot ensued to the point where they withdrew all but two of their non-Filipino employees because of the number of death threats. Two people died when a Pepsi delivery truck was firebombed.

There may be a lot of other horrible PR moves but I don't think any of them ended up with people dead because of it. You can thank Pepsi for taking the cake on that one.

DiGiorno's and #WhyIStayed

There was a big movement on Twitter to spread awareness of domestic a***e and how there are times where the woman doesn't realize her SO is a*****e. So women are sharing their own stories and tagging #WhyIStayed

Somebody on the marketing team at DiGiornos completely missed the tone/purpose of this and DiGiornos ended up tweeting "#WhyIStayed: He had pizza." Didn't go over so well

The GM robot commercial during the 2007 Super Bowl a few years ago.

A personified assembly line robot gets "replaced" by a more advanced one and is let go from the company. It's so depressed it goes to jump off a bridge.

This was right after GM had laid off over 30,000 people for almost those exact reasons. The commercial was meant to be cute.

EDIT: The reason the robot gets let go is because he messed up, not got replaced. I wrote the description from memory and then linked the video in a rush before I went to work. The point still stands about how it was a bad PR move and was in terrible taste. So for those of you pointing that out I'm sorry. Since I messed up, I might just go jump off a bridge.

LifeLock's CEO gave out his social security number and challenged people to steal his identity. Guess what happened, 13 times in a row?

While Davis said that this proved LifeLock worked since identity thieves were only successful 13 times, the FTC disagreed and fined the company $12 million for deceptive advertising in March 2010.

BP's CEO Tony Hayward, after the Gulf Coast oil spill, telling reporters "I'd like my life back."

To be fair, the full quote is ""We're sorry for the massive disruption it's caused to their lives. There's no one who wants this thing over more than I do. I'd like my life back."

But the oil CEO presenting himself as the biggest victim of the oil spill that was destroying livelihoods (and the environment) was...well...a bold move, Cotton. Let's see how it plays out for him:

He was "replaced" less than a month later.

Bud Light's *Up for Whatever* campaign:

“The perfect beer for removing ‘No’ from your vocabulary for the night.”.

In the 1993 Canadian federal election, the ruling but unpopular Progressive Conservative party released an attack ad against Liberal leader Jean Chrétien. The ad highlighted Chrétien's bells palsy and closed with a question along the lines of, "Do you want THIS man running the country?"

Chrétien became Prime Minister, the Progressive Conservatives went from majority to fifth place and missing out on official party status. Within ten years they were absorbed by the Reform Party.

Justine Sacco, the d**n communications DIRECTOR for InterActive Corp, before a trip to South Africa tweeted:

"Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!".

How does the head of PR of a large public company tweet that?

OJ Simpson publishing a book about how he "would have" k****d his wife.

After being exposed for using racist language, Paula Deen goes into damage control mode to prove she's not a racist, & makes her way onto talk shows with a friend - "Hollis" - who is "as black as that board... step away from that board so we can see you!" Needless to say, she ended up coming off even worse than before. Howard Stern had some funny remarks about this.

Last year, the Pittsburgh Penguins decided to do a Q&A session on Twitter involving James Neal, a skilled player with....well, let's say that he's not exactly known for fair play. He has a history of borderline and outright dirty play, including cross-checking opponents in the face, elbowing them in the head, and also an incident of kneeing an opponent in the head.

Sample questions from various hockey fans:

* James, do you get the biggest thrill out of kneeing someone in the head or cross checking them in the head?

* Do you make rocket noises when you launch yourself at peoples' heads? if not, why?

* Do you think before cross-checking people in the head or is it just pure instinct?

* If you opened a bar how cheap would your shots be

* what part of the stick should I be holding to really lay a good cross check to someone's head?

* If a tree falls down in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does James Neal still cross check it in the face?

* what favorite memory have you robbed from one of the players you kneed to the head?

* A train leaves NYC traveling at 97 mph, another train leaves LA traveling at 76 mph, when do you headshot the child riding coach?

* if you could go back in time and play with any player in history, which one would you knee in the face?

* if you were holding a baby and dropped it on its head, would it already be unconscious from your previous elbow to the head?

* James, my roommate stole my food. should I lunge at his head, elbow him in the temple or drive my knee into his skull?

* If the moon was made of BBQ Spare Ribs, would you still leave your feet to charge at it?

* when you go into a corner and there are 3 people, and you only have 2 elbows, how do u decide which one gets kneed?

#MyNYPD

I straight up have no idea what they were expecting.

For those out of the loop, # MyNYPD was a PR stunt by the NYPD to try to show the people of NY that cops are mostly good people out to protect and serve. THing is, they asked people to use the hashtag #MyNYPD to tell their stories or post post their pictures of positive encounters they might have had with the police. Of course, people used it to post pictures depicting police brutality as well as other negative headlines the NYPD has made over the years (e.g. NYPD ends man on wedding day, beats an 84 year old man bloody for jaywalking, etc.)

I had never seen anything go that sour or that fast before.

But I mean, what the h**l did they think was gonna happen? Who exactly is it they figured uses hashtags #AND has nothing but rave reviews for the police nowadays?

God d**n, I got here way to late, but I'm going to go with Texas Governor candidate Clayton Williams saying "Bad weather is like r**e, you can't control it, so you might as well sit back and enjoy it."

I think he was projected to win the race for Governor and ended up loosing after making these comments.

The Ludlow M******e. Miners working for the Rockefellers went on strike in Colorado. The answer? To call in the National Guard to shoot down the miners and their families.

And so the modern PR Machine was born. The Rockefellars founded the first "Public Relations" department to handle the backlash of the m******e, they also created the Rockefeller Foundation to show the world what great folks they are.

In order to prove that tetraethyl lead (leaded gasoline additive) was safe, the manufacturer, Thomas Midgely, Jr. poured some on his hands and inhaled it for 60 seconds during a press conference. He was later diagnosed with lead poisoning.

* That press conference was likely Standard Oil's idea. They had a knack for ridiculously bad PR moves related to leaded gasoline. Their New Jersey chemical plant manufactured tetraethyl lead gas additive for one year. In that time,

> The men who worked in the TEL building, in the clanking heat and drifting vapors, had become increasingly odd – moody, short-tempered, unable to sleep. Some of the workers started getting lost on the familiar plant grounds, had trouble even remembering their friends. And then, in October of 1924, laborers from that same building started collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously.

Of the 45 employees working with ethyl lead, [all](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,728055,00.html) were hospitalized for insanity, and 5 died within the year.

> Standard Oil issued a coolly dismissive response: “These men probably went insane because they worked too hard,” the building manager told *The New York Times*.

Canadian here. Not sure how many of you are familiar with Jian Ghomeshi, but he's a famous television personality, known best for his interview show "Q". When the CBC fired him, he posted on Facebook that he was fired for liking " rough s*x". At first, he drew a great deal of sympathy. Then the real facts came flooding in: he was a serial a****r of women, and the CBC fired him after he had shown them pictures of a girl whose ribs he had fractured. Women began to speak publicly about his a***e, and several pressed charges. He's now on trial, facing life in prison. All from a self-pitying Facebook post.

One summer in the early 90's on long Island they launched a massive PR campaign for vacationing on L.I., come see our beautiful beaches, our historic landmarks, family vacation of a lifetime, yada yada. That was also the summer they decided to do construction on all 3 of the main east/west roadways (L.I. Expressway and Norther and Southern State Parkways). The entire summer was one endless traffic jam. I'm sure anyone who responded to the vacationing PR campaign decided to never set foot on L.I. again.

In America, John McCain's choice of running mate in the 2008 presidential election is pretty widely believed to have been entirely a PR move and most agree that it backfired pretty badly.

How the heck has nobody mentioned:

* When McDonald's in the US did that scratchcard deal where they would give you a scratchcard which had an olympic event in it, and if the US won (medal? Gold? I don't remember) they would give you a free burger or something. Of course, they calculated it so that most of the events would be ones usually won by Soviets. Guess who boycotted the olympics that year... Brilliantly parodied by the Simpsons.

* Hoover giving away free plane tickets with their vacuum cleaners. People were buying them just to get the plane tickets, which were actually worth more than the vacuum cleaners themselves in many cases.