Hall of Shame: 5 Examples of Bad Ad Copy

These marketing blunders are just a few examples of what can go wrong when organizations don’t consult a native-speaking professional when preparing advertising copy. The examples might be funny to us now, but they certainly weren’t funny to the offended recipients of the messages and subsequently to the organizations that produced them, losing face or business in the process.

1.    Shame on you KPN! Write a decent airport billboard ad simply and easily!



There are many things wrong with the ad pictured above apart from the writer’s failure to use adverbs in the headline:

-    What is the difference between doing something simply and easily anyway? Perhaps “quickly” would have been a good substitute
-    The sub-heading is baffling – shouldn’t it read laptop?
-    The sub-heading uses the Dutch convention of adding a comma dash behind round numbers. English convention is to write either €3 or €3.00.
-    The call to action sentence has a missing link. It should read “To purchase…”
-    Writing “top button” is very vague. What does the button say?
-    Lastly, the actual product is not named anywhere in the ad 

Not being able to help myself, I’ve rewritten the ad: “Get online quickly and easily. Connect to KPN Hotspots from just €3. / OR / Internet access on the go from just €3. To buy time online using your credit card, just click the top “Get Online” link”. 

2.     How would you feel if you were Hispanic and lived in this U.S. town?

Sometimes, non-native speakers disregard the important typographical conventions of a foreign language. For instance, one town in the U.S. had a bilingual banner printed in honour of its centennial anniversary. The banner celebrated 100 anos of municipal history. Unfortunately, while año is the word for year, ano is the word for anus.

3.    Always Coca-Cola, or always a “female horse stuffed with wax”?

The name Coca-Cola in China was first rendered in characters roughly approximate to ke-ke-ken-la. The Coke Company spent thousands on printed signs before they realised that, depending on the dialect, this phrase can either mean “bite the wax tadpole” or “female horse stuffed with wax”. Finally, after researching 40,000 Chinese characters, Coke found the following close phonetic equivalent, ko-kou-ko-le, which can be loosely translated as “happiness in the mouth”. I’ll have one of those please.

4.    What not to do when going global: baffle your audience
In 2000, French sandwich chain Lina’s launched an international campaign to attract foreign franchisees. Unfortunately, the slogan they used was written by a self-proclaimed bilingual employee. The result does not make any sense in the English language: “Tomorrow, we will expect on your dynamism”. The company didn’t receive a single response to this campaign.

5.     Double your disastrous slogan and “Touch Woody - The Internet Pecker”
For those of you unfamiliar with U.S. slang, this phrase combines two words used to refer to the male member in a most unfortunate way. Luckily for Panasonic, the product launch running this slogan was stopped just in time. It was to be used in a campaign promoting a Japanese web browser developed by Panasonic for Matsushita Electric, employing the cartoon character “Woody Woodpecker” as an internet guide.