Spooky Ad Stories To Tell At The Brainstorm
What’s scarier than showing up to the startup-sponsored Halloween Happy Hour and realizing that 11 other people dressed up as Eleven from Stranger Things? Oh, our copywriters, strategists, and designers could think of a few things.
We tracked down the most terrifying tales from the crypt (i.e., our NYC, SF, and SLC offices), and they’re perfect for sharing around the campfire at your next bougie creative retreat. Enter, if you dare, an advertising horror world of grave social media mistakes, ghostly pitch meetings, and bad fonts from HELL.
It was a dark and stormy night, and the junior social media manager goblin was loading posts onto Tweetdeck for United Underworld Airlines, when he accidentally posted a tweet of his shirtless-gym-locker-room-mirror selfie to their global audience of 4.6 million witches and warlocks!
In the midst of the witching hour, while the Hag Depot account team slept soundly and blissfully unaware in their beds, their celebrity brand ambassador went on a Twitter rant…tweeting that werewolves were no better than dogs. It was a full moon.
They seemed super into us. We had a couple good pitch meetings, went out for drinks, the chemistry was really there. We sent our proposal over, thinking we’d live happily ever after. But they had vanished, and we never heard from them again! That’s when we realized it: They were ghost clients the whole time…
Once there was a dangerously curious junior account goblin, who thought mixing creative potions was probably easier than the art witches let on. One night, by the light of the full moon, she broke into the creative team’s secret lair, scoffed at the Cauldron Guidelines book, and got to work. She poured in supersized logos, all-caps serif headlines, and flattened PSD files, cackling with abandon as the pot of pastels bubbled into a green-olive swirl…and the ghost of Comic Sans rose up from the steam.
It was a dark and stormy Friday night, and all the creative ghosts and ghostettes were ready to go back to their haunted homes to relax, watch some BooLu, and indulge in paranormal snacktivity. All of a sudden, a harrowing screech echoed from a few of their MacBOOk Pros — it was the grizzly, ominous ting of an e-mail notification. Just one more quick piece of feedback, it read.
The lightning cracked in the sky as the copywriter set about making edits to his creation. “A few more tweaks!” said Igor, the account manager, as he opened another email from the client. “Just a few more!” Wiping his brow, the copywriter dove in, making the snips, the restructures, adding in crucial reasons to believe.
The copywriter went to bed that evening with only a nagging sense of unease. He awoke hours later to the sound of someone — or someTHING — gasping for breath. Stumbling out of bed and glancing over at his MacBook, he realized…he had created…the horror! FRANKEN-CONTENT!!! It lives!
The creative team was ready for the big new Proctor & Goblin pitch. They had cooked up a snazzy new idea for social that would get the client spooky good engagement among young ghouls and gremlins. Yet, when the team finished their PowerPoint presentation, the client looked at them with tears in her eyes and said, “That social platform’s dead. It’s been dead for two whole weeks!”
’Twas a dark hallows’ eve,
Feedback circling all night,
It was too many opinions, with no end in sight.
But wait one more edit, the client did say,
“It’s really not telling what we want to convey.”
In a mad flick of typing, words ready to brawl,
He was mortified to realize he had hit reply-all.
As they stood over the fresh grave, the strategist brushed the dirt and dried blood off of her hands.
“Is it really dead?” asked the designer.
“Yes, we killed it. There’s no way it could have survived,” she said. Just to make sure, she fired another round of bullets into the grave. “That QR code idea can’t hurt us anymore, I promise.”
As they turned to leave the woods, an eerie voice floated up from the ground “But what if weeee addded an influuuuuencer??”
