Cool Marketing Thoughts

In his book, Max Lenderman also pointed to the campaign of a certain sneaker brand, in which the brand is pictured in a rather sexual context. Max used this example to explain the way a subviral advertisement works (i.e. a viral ad secretly produced by a company, which the company denies any knowledge of… allowing them to experiment with more controversial forms of marketing). I never really saw the ads so I went sniffing around a little in an effort to actually see what the buzz was all about. And yes, I came up with the uncensored version. And no, I won’t publish the uncensored version because that company sent out a statement, pretty fast after the images were leaked to the internet in which they stepped back from the ads and stated that legal actions would be taken against anyone who published them. Since I don’t have a team of lawyers, I’m not going to publish ‘the real ones’, instead I photoshopped the originals and added them here.

[Company name] Statement regarding unauthorized “bad taste advertisement”:
It has been brought to our attention that several unauthorized, sexually suggestive advertisements portraying the [company brand ] have been released over the Internet. We are appalled that images like these would be created and distributed under the [company name] name. As a brand, we seek to take a unique perspective toward our advertising in an effort to challenge the boundaries of our industry; however we would never consider using these tactics.
We are in the process of researching the circumstances and reserve any legal steps available.

So. Here are those ads:

So is the mystery solved? Yes, apparently it is. According to the Museum of Hoaxes:

What really happened – a small Eastern European agency affiliated with Saatchi & Saatchi created the ads on spec, trying to win business with a [company name] subsidiary. They got nothing and emailed the ads to friends; from that point it snowballed. As you can guess, when the [company name] powers-that-be decided to get all corporate on the blogosphere, the whole thing exploded. Poor Pete M.’s ([company name] in the US) email inbox exploded with junk after that, with his name being on the cease and desist. No “Brazilian Maxim”, no evil master plan (they’re real but we’ll say they’re fake), but online store sales were up like CRAZY for a couple of weeks. Too bad we didn’t even have the shoes in the ads in stock!

Buzz: here, here, here, here, …