26Dole Bananas
One of the few times Pink Floyd allowed their music to be used for corporate advertising was a bizarre 1973 ad for Dole bananas.
27. The “Fearless Girl” statue that’s famous for “standing up to the Bull on Wallstreet” was commissioned by an investments firm, State Street Global Advisors, which holds $2.8 trillion in assets. The statue was to advertise a new investment fund they were offering.
28. Partnership for a Drug-Free America, which used to air many PSAs through the 80s to the mid-2000s, was actually funded by alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical companies. The ads steered clear warnings about legal drugs being abused.
29. Victoria's Secret was originally marketed to men to buy for their partners. Leslie Wexner bought it for $1 million and changed the marketing to women. To create the illusion of luxury, the company listed on catalogs that it was headquartered at a fake London address, but the real one was in Columbus, Ohio.
30. Burger King launched a $40 million ad campaign in November 1985 called “Where’s Herb?” The idea was to find a character named Herb who’d never been to Burger King. Other chains pointed out that if Herb wasn’t at Burger King, it meant he probably liked other chains' burgers more. Burger King’s profits fell 40% in 1986.
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31Share a Coke
The “Share a Coke” campaign, where Coca-Cola replaced its name on bottles with people’s first names, increased Coca-Cola's U.S. sales by more than 2% and, in doing so, helped reverse more than 10 years of decline in Coke consumption in the U.S.
32. In the 1990s, Subaru realized that it was surprisingly popular with lesbians, and decided to develop a campaign subtly, but specifically, targeting that core group, helping to push gay and lesbian advertising from the fringes to the mainstream.
33. Fiji Water once ran an ad campaign stating “The label says Fiji because it's not bottled in Cleveland.” The city of Cleveland responded by testing both Fiji water and their own tap water. They found 6.3 micrograms of arsenic in Fiji water, and none in their own.
34. For years Chrysler advertised their luxury cars as containing “Corinthian leather” with Ricardo Montalbán as the spokesman. On Late Night with David Letterman Montalbán playfully admitted that the term meant nothing. The leather was actually sourced from New Jersey.
35. In an attempt to boost the sales of the Playstation 2, Sony’s marketing chief attempted to anonymously seed a story to news outlets that Saddam Hussein had imported 4,000 PS2s to use their processing power to build nuclear weapons.
