Stupid PR Stunts That Backfired Hard

The AMA was led by THQ head of PR and marketing Phillip Brock, a man who apparently has never read his job briefing, and went off the rails as quickly as you'd expect. But through it all, Brock kept responding jocularly to all the toxic questions, ignoring the anti-PC coding and straight-up homophobic slurs as if he had developed selective bigot blindness. When one of the site's closeted pedophiles posted a question asking "where the big tiddie lolis at" with an explicit image of two large-breasted children attached, master of spin Brock replied: "you got them already we'd say," probably while thinking how great he was at his job.

News of the AMA quickly received a torrent of backlash on regular, medium-toxic social media. Before the day was even over, half of THQ C-suite had to go on a public apology tour, including Brock. "I do not condone child pornography, white supremacy, or racism in any shape or form," said the man who had a nice fireside chat with the internet's most notorious harassers, pedo creeps, and white supremacists. He also added that he "agreed to this AMA without doing my proper due diligence to understand the history and the controversy of the site," not realizing that any public relations guy in gaming who openly admits that he doesn't know where the Gamergaters hang out should be fired on the spot.

In 2017, Zuckerberg was champing at the bit to showcase his Spaces, Facebook's new virtual reality platform. So he and VR chief Rachel Franklin fired up the ol' Oculus Rift and took a little publicity tour of his favorite places. Zuckerberg went to his own house, the moon, oh, and the moist ruins of a postapocalyptic Puerto Rico. And as if promoting your new crappy social media feature using the site of human suffering as a 360-degree background, did we mention they all looked like funny cartoons?

During the tour, Virtual Zuckerberg (which is almost redundant) remarked that "it feels like we're really here in Puerto Rico" -- minus the destruction and lack of basic living essentials. He also took the time to brag about all the money he had donated and the Facebook data he had shared with the Red Cross to help, though what aid workers need with a bunch of stolen dick pics and illegal metadata is beyond us. After engineers tweaked some of Zuckerberg's wires, the walking gaffe machine realized he had made a mistake and apologized. "Reading some of the comments," he wrote. "I realize this wasn't clear, and I'm sorry to anyone this offended." So at least his passive-aggressive chip is still working fine.

Except that Dino didn't see two things coming. One, that MDM would be such an enormous flop that, aside from four Razzie nominations, it only garnered $980,000 at the box office. That's a few thou short of recouping the contest even, let alone the movie's entire $9.5 million budget. Secondly, that the clues were so laughably easy that hundreds of audience members immediately deduced that the money was hidden in the Statue of Liberty's nose. With the contest winner picked at random, the million dollars was given to a high school sophomore Alesia Lenae Jones who said she was going to use it to buy a pony, braces, and put the rest in a trust fund, proving she'd spend that money more wisely than the terrible makers of Million Dollar Mystery ever would.

IBM is one of the oldest tech companies in the world, and like any oldster, it doesn't always know how to court diversity. In 2015, their marketing team (which had to include zero women) decided to run a campaign encouraging young women to experiment with electronics. And what's the only piece of electronics school girls care about, these PR geniuses reckoned? Their hair dryer, of course, so the company launched its #HackAHairdryer initiative, telling ladies to step out that kitchen for a moment, fiddle around with their hairdryers and send the results over to Daddy IBM.

And it's not like IBM didn't have the chance to backtrack. The ill-advised campaign was ignored for months before female scientists started stumbling onto the sexist video. After the kind of blowback you can only get from a hacked hairdryer, the company issued a statement on Twitter, apologizing and reminding everyone that asking women to fix hair dryers was merely "part of a larger campaign to promote STEM careers" that we assume involved hacking many more items you can find in a Barbie Dreamhouse.

On April 27th, with the President giving a televised speech on the other side of the country, the people of New York City saw an unscheduled Air Force One and two fighter planes hanging low and barreling toward the center of New York City and Ground Zero. While the government had informed the NYPD of this, it had specifically barred them from warning the people of New York for maximum authenticity. And authentic is exactly how they responded, with screaming and sobbing citizens as far as New Jersey being evacuated from high rise buildings.

The unfortunate fly-by was a political nightmare, with a "furious" NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg claiming he only found out when his phone almost exploded with the angry calls of his constituents. In the aftermath, the director of the White House Military Office had to fall on his decorative saber and the photo-op PR stunt was grounded for life.

That is, until 2020, when JetBlue tried nearly the exact same stunt to cheer up a city ravaged by the outbreak of COVID-19. Because if there's any way to get New Yorkers' minds off the fact that their city has suffered a 27,000+ virus death toll in a matter of months, it's inadvertently invoking the deadliest terrorist attack in history. (In business school, that's what the experts call "synergy.")

RG Jordan is not big on social media but he is big on working and eating food so you can contact him at RGJordan4 at gmail dot com if you think his words are funny or insightful.

Top Image: Flickr/lyncconf.com