Rare Marketing

2 min read

Your massively undercooked take on the world of advertising. To get it served up in your inbox every month, sign up here.

Stick with unleaded.

This expensive and admittedly beautiful spot from Diesel is a perfect example of style masquerading as substance. Embracing the “we’re all different/celebrate your flaws” routine is getting stale, especially when Axe did it so much better. It also seems like an awful lot of trouble to sell me pants—but that’s what happens when your jeans cost the same as a lease payment on a Camry.

Getting possessed sucks.

Advertising your product with an Exorcist parody is a gamble. But Dirt Devil went for it—and pulled it off in brilliant fashion—with this classic spot. The only way this could have been better is if the girl was possessed by the ancient Oreck man, leading to an insatiable urge to lift vacuums with her pinky.

Groundhog granny.

It’s not every day that you get to see an old woman zapped by lighting, shot, run over by a bus, and exploded to smithereens—and feel compelled to laugh about it. But this spot from Zonajobs—the Argentinian equivalent to Monster.com—will have you doing just that. RIP nana.

You got words in my syrup.

Apparently, making people zoom in on pictures to find hidden messages is a cool new meme. I’m having a hard time figuring out how it’s anything but annoying, but Denny’s ran with the idea in a pretty clever way. Unfortunately, my “Perkins4Lyfe” tattoo prevents me from ever setting foot in a Denny’s.

GameFlop.

Here’s some atrocious advertising from GameStop, the notoriously slipshod video game retailer. Unfortunately, this isn’t one of those so-bad-it’s-good commercials. It’s more of a sharp-stick-to-the-eye kind of commercial. It looks like a 2004 school project that some sixth-grader gave up on because Family Guy was starting.