Catch Nathan for You Thursdays at 10/9c on Comedy Central or anytime on the Comedy Central app.
For the past two seasons on Nathan For You, Comedy Central star Nathan Fielder has done an amazing job helping small businesses by creating some buzzworthy marketing campaigns, including creating a viral video for a petting zoo and offering up a way for a liquor store to legally sell booze to underage customers. Even as we enjoy the start of the third season of Nathan For You, which airs Thursdays at 10/9c on Comedy Central and on the Comedy Central app, we have to wonder why Nathan isn’t using his business degree to help even bigger corporations achieve even greater sales success by taking advantage of his outside the box thinking. Just think of how these 10 companies could have avoided controversy and ridicule with even a little bit of Nathan’s help.
1. Burger King’s “Where’s Herb?” campaign
Nothing about this mid-’80s promotional effort by Burger King went right. Created by the ad firm of J. Walter Thompson, the idea was to get customers to flock to the restaurants in hopes of finding Herb. Trouble was, no one knew what he looked like. So even after peppering TV, radio, and print with information about this nerdy dude who had never eaten at Burger King along with the reward of $5,000 for finding him, people didn’t know what to look for. And by the time they did reveal his face, during an ad break in Super Bowl XX, no one really cared anymore. After three months, BK dropped the campaign and dropped J. Walter Thompson as their ad firm.
2. Hyundai IX35
This little U.K. television ad got the Korean car company in a whole heap of trouble. In it, a depressed man attempts to commit suicide by locking himself in the garage with his Hyundai IX35 running. But as the ad reveals, his car doesn’t produce enough harmful emissions to get the job done. Naturally, this was met with a lot of outrage, forcing the company’s European office to yank the thing from circulation and issue an apology.
3. Hawaiian Tropic KKK ad
To sell a few more bottles of suntan lotion in Argentina, Hawaiian Tropic’s ad agency Grey Buenos Aires conceived of an ad (which ran in the South American edition of Rolling Stone) in which two members of the Ku Klux Klan are seen dragging away an unwitting dude because his skin is so dark. You know, from tanning. Protests ensued, the ad was pulled, and the agency and the magazine’s advertising department had to walk it all back.
4. Calvin Klein’s pervy ads
How bad does an ad campaign have to get for the FBI to open up an investigation about it? Try placing young models in various states of undress (but still wearing Calvin Klein jeans) in a wood-paneled room, have an unseen adult ask them questions and give them directions, and shoot the whole thing like some kind of illegal pornography. The company faced a firestorm of criticism, but that didn’t stop them from making more poor marketing decisions like the 1999 billboard ads featuring pre-teen boys and girls in their underwear.
5. New Coke
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