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Every now and again a company will attempt to widen the market for their product with a gimmick or a slick ad campaign. And roughly 90% of the time it fails utterly because there’s a reason their product wasn’t attractive to those demographics in the first place.

The golden standard for this kind of misstep is the campaign that tried to rebrand Las Vegas as a family destination (eventually they recognized their error and went back to the old slogan “Kill a hooker, we won’t tell”), but there are several lesser known examples that we wanted to bring attention to.

1) Disney World’s “F-ck a Disney Princess” offer

Effort: Upon realizing that his park was practically overrun by children, Michael Eisner tapped his “Imagineers” to come up with something that would attract childless adults. Seeing as how Imagineers are just engineers who get laid even more infrequently, their minds immediately went to paying for sex and weird cartoon porn. Combining the two, Disney enacted a policy in the mid nineties that allowed park visitors to pay $100 in Disney bucks for a throw on any of the park’s dress up princesses. For $500 a group of seven could gang bang Snow White (dwarf costumes included).

Reason for failure: The policy was eventually canceled after it was the subject of an EPA lawsuit over the mercury content of Ariel’s vagina.

2) Hooters’ “Free Mammogram with entree” offer

Effort: Long a destination for guy’s night out and a thorn in the side of girlfriends and wives, Hooters attempted in 1993 to double their customer base by offering free mammograms at all of their locations. Upper management believed that it kept with the “breasts” theme they had spent years cultivating while presenting the chain as a more female friendly restaurant.

Reason for failure: The offer ended after four women died of breast cancer less than a month after a Hooters mammogram had declared them cancer free and the ensuing investigation revealed that the mammogram machines were really just windows into the kitchen.

I’m not going to lie, that trend line disturbs me.

5) Relationship Status

At the time of this writing, only two states in the country have legalized gay marriage, yet 90% of college aged women claim to be married to their best female friends. This is a factual impossibility, no matter how many bumper stickers written by total strangers are sent back and forth as if they were inside jokes. Additionally, if more men actually married their “shorties” instead of figuring that nicknaming her “wifey” is close enough, we might not have a single mother epidemic.

The Lie:

The Truth:

The Lie:

The Truth:

4) Friends

Primate research suggests that there is a finite number of others we are capable of caring for and maintaining emotional connections to, but Facebook research indicates differently. Fortunately my massive primate brain is able to handle a near infinite number of bullsh-t claims, the thousand-friend-myth among them. This isn’t even remotely true.

The Lie                                                     The Truth

It doesn’t help that 982 of those photos are actually of his custom built PC which he has named Jerome Jr.

1) Jasmine and Jafar.

These exceptionally rare white bengal twins were named for the Disney characters in Aladdin. It’s an odd choice, as Jasmine was the nubile (and knowing Disney likely fourteen) love interest in the movie and Jafar was the villain with pederast tendencies. At the very least he gave off a heavy “creepy uncle” vibe whenever he was around Jasmine.

2) Knut

In addition to being friggin adorable, polar bear cub Knut rose to prominence when an animal rights group advocated his euthanization after he was rejected by his mother. His name quickly went from starring in puns on the word “cute” to puns on the word “execute”. Now nearing maturity where he will be studded out to female polar bears to keep the species going, Knut gets very defensive about his “adorable” past (including a downright precious Vanity Fair cover), insisting that he is a “bear, not a cub”. He has taken up smoking cigarettes in order to appear older and cooler.

3) Flocke

Pronounced “Flock-a”, this female polar bear shares many similarities with Knut, except she tests poorly at math and science and is demonstratively less capable at sports. Her name, which means “snowflake” in German, while cute in her infancy became a burden during high school. Male polar bears (including the aforementioned Knut) made a regular pun out of it, bragging about which of them had “Flocke-d” her, and in which orifices.

11) Jason Giambi’s mustache.

Originally, it was conceived as a way to grow hair that didn’t serve as a forensic record of a decade of steroid abuse. However, since growing in, Jason Giambi’s mustache has starred in thirty four adult films, including one where the slugger’s mustache serves porn starlets penetrated by Louisville Sluggers to inner city children at Yankee Stadium, called “The Twicecream Man”.

12) Joba Chamberlain’s adamant refusal to enter the game to the music from Return of the Jedi.

13) Digging up the planted Red Sox jersey.

In the interests of full disclosure, I will say here that burying that jersey in the first place was frankly a retarded stunt, and some Bronx born guido needs to shut the fu©k up about “Red Sox Nation”. That being said, the Yankees paid $88/hr to union workers to come in on a Sunday and dig it up. For those keeping score at home, the Yankees literally have (and will spend) “f-ck you” money.