marketing

Listen, we appreciate that our advanced technologies have allowed us to transport wine in inventive ways and charge our phones from the couch. We even appreciate the simple bathtub tray for allowing us to watch a movie or read while soaking in a hot tub. But apparently their marketing teams are pretty clueless as to what people actually do in the tub. As Twitter user @doodlyroses pointed out in this thread, not only do bath tray manufacturers believe that only women take baths, they believe that they eat gigantic charcuterie boards while relaxing - and drink enough in the tub to pass out. The photos are ridiculous, and verge on sexist, but we think they'll provide you with a good laugh. Which is rare these days.

Since the dawn of marketing, businesses have bent over backwards to appeal to the hottest demographic cohorts of the decades. There's nothing they won't co-opt, no 'hip slang' they won't butcher just to sell you a bag of chips. It's fun to imagine a highly neurotic social media marketing 'expert' in 2020 studying Urban Dictionary, furiously scribbling 'thicc' and 'mad sus bro' into a giant ledger. Brands aren't the only ones attempting to communicate with Zoomers through memes. Parents and teachers are putting on their 'fellow kids' hats in a desperate move to appeal to distracted students—though we think these attempts can be somewhat wholesome.

We've put together some of our favorite examples of corporate marketing teams and distressed teachers taking a stab at memeing. Most of the time they totally fail, but a few of these made us chuckle.

Pretty refreshing experience when you pull back the curtain of strategic marketing to get at what brands are really selling, huh?

Give that marketing department a damn raise. This shit's brilliant. 

Sometimes adults and brands try way too hard to seem current, hip, and with it. These are some of our favorite (and fresh) pandering moments. We kind of want to give these people credit for trying.

James McMinn is a divorce attorney based out of North Carolina. But unlike most lawyers, James has a pretty wicked sense of humor. He also has a facebook marketing that might just be the most genius technique we've ever seen. We must say getting a divorce seems much less painful now. 

These people all tried to market something - whether that something was good or not is debatable, but they all produced some pretty WTF-worthy ways of pushing their services.

(Sidenote: these are not real ads - check out Alan Wagner for more).

Do you ever just stop to think about how we're living in a dystopian nightmare and that life doesn't matter at all? You go to work every day to make money just to pay for your miserable life, and then you die without ever retiring. Enjoy these tidbits from our corporate overlords!

Author, Kate O'Neill used her platform on Twitter to encourage people participating in online activities like the recent, trending profile picture aging meme on Facebook, to slow down and think about it critically. O'Neill asks people to consider how willingly posting that information online for Facebook's seemingly sentient algorithm to digest, can have a ripple effect on society as a whole; how that information can be fed into worldwide databases, sold off to advertising agencies, and used to exploit the very people that upload it, without considering the impacts, in the process. She doesn't aim to inspire panic in this Twitter thread, but instead, she wants us to think critically when considering the fast-changing landscape of the world around us. Some solid advice! 

Lane Bryant has made an effort in their advertising to support diversity and body positivity. When they started a chat on Twitter with the hashtag #AskLaneBryant they opened themselves up to criticism from the public that suggests they are really falling short.