Obviously, the goal of any beer, wine, or liquor ad is to sell a product, and that’s usually accomplished by selling a lifestyle, too. But that’s a tough trick to pull off, and despite focus groups, data, and decades of work to study, advertisement success is hard to predict — and sometimes, the more unconventional ones tend to work out best. (Consider the Budweiser Frogs or the brand’s “Whassup!” ad.)
Figuring out what’s going to strike a resonant chord with the general drinking public can be a gamble. And of the countless booze ads out there, many have missed the mark. That’s why we scoured the internet to find what we believe to be the absolute worst beer, wine, and spirits ads throughout history.
In curating this list, we stuck to video and didn’t consider print ads, although there are plenty of terrible ones out there. Without further ado, from the confusing to the strange to the flat-out offensive, here are our picks for the worst booze ads of all time.
Falstaff Beer: ‘Man-Sized Pleasure’ (1950s-1960s)
While this may not be the worst ad in the roundup, it definitely has its faults. For one, we’re not here to tell you what recreational activities are best with a beer in hand, but target practice with a compound bow certainly isn’t one of them. And let’s be honest: What the actual f*ck is “man-sized pleasure”? Playing up machismo was an unfortunate signature of ‘50s and ‘60s beer advertising, but
