4 Companies That Tried Edgy PR Stunts Online (And Failed)

3 New Zealand Police Make Memes About Notifying Next Of Kin

Aspiring comedians are often advised to base their material on what they know best, but that doesn't really work when "what you know best" is scraping the splattered remains of human beings off the road. Nobody told that to whichever unappreciated deputy runs the New Zealand Police Twitter account, though. So they wound up posting this:

2 Pizza Hut Mocked A Palestinian Hunger Striker

Most people try to stay out of the whole Israel vs. Palestine debate, even if their entire job is to stay in the Israel vs. Palestine debate. So when you're an entity that exists solely to provide people with shitty pizza, no one expects you to have an opinion. But in 2017, Pizza Hut just had to have themselves an opinion.

Hugely influential Palestinian Marwan Barghouti was facing intense scrutiny for allegedly cheating on a hunger strike while in an Israeli jail. Barghouti was leading a strike movement to draw attention to the Palestinian cause, but the Israeli Prison Service attempted to shame him by releasing footage of him sneaking cookies and a chocolate bar, as if he was in the world's most brutal fat camp.

The images soon appeared all over the region's social media. The appropriate response from Pizza Hut's Israeli Facebook account would be nothing, because why on Earth would it ever be something? But somehow they simply couldn't resist, and soon sent edited images of Barghouti to their 100,000 followers, saying, "Barghouti, if you're going to break a strike, isn't pizza better?"

1 Dove Makes Throwback Ads ... That Throw Back To Racism

Back in the day, soap companies used to advertise that they were powerful enough to scrub the melanin off black people, but we got off that whole kick sometime around the Civil Rights Movement.

Then Dove decided that it was time for a retro ad campaign, which was fine, and made it about celebrating the superior cleanliness of white people, which was less fine. They created this Facebook ad, which should have died about three seconds into peer review:

After the inevitable complaints, Dove issued an apology, saying they'd "missed the mark in representing women of color thoughtfully." Which is a little like saying you "missed the mark in representing Christianity thoughtfully" after burning a cross on somebody's lawn.

Stephan Roget does Twitter stuff over @StephanRoget, and does Cracked stuff over at right here! They are almost certainly not a Russian algorithm designed to undermine Western society with pithy observations about popular culture! Nyet way!

Let's keep The Office strictly in binge-watching format, especially just in case it's ever removed from Netflix.

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For more, check out 29 Huge Social Media Gaffes By Huge Companies and 6 Offensive Messages Hidden In Huge Marketing Campaigns.

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