Pity these Fools

To celebrate April Fools day, we're going to look at some of the worst advertising and PR attrocities that cost millions.
1. Killing Napster
In 2001 the RIAA (The Music Industry) killed Napster, and signed their own death warrant. No company, in the history of business, has managed to so blindly over look TRILLIONS in revenue. Napster represented throngs of savvy young music consumers with dispossable income and a desire for music in an exciting new format. No, "represented" is the wrong word. Napster WAS throngs of young consumers. Ignorance made them sue Napster, but thats nothing compared to the level of stupidity required to sue your own gawdamn consumers. "If I sue them for millions over the music they download, surly they'll see the light and start buying our records again".

2. Vista
In an attempt to compete with the user friendly Leopard and Linux OS, two very easy, intuitive OS's, Microsoft released Vista, an OS that requires a computer sciences degree to operate ... late. Vista is a good OS, its just not good for the end user. Out of the box Vista expects people to have an indepth understanding of execution variables, multi-layered interfaces, runtime commands and windows quick keys. Packaged with an interface that rivals Quark. Whats worse, it was released late and imcomplete. How late? Just after Christmas late. Just after biggest buying season of the year late. Man, thats just tiny and flimsy ... wait a minute, micro, soft, hey I just got it!

3. Candidate Wal-Mart
Because I had to get at least 1 actual campaign in here. Candidate Wal-Mart was the single biggest ad campaign Wal-Mart ever embarked on, and the single biggest hit to their sales since ... you know what, any stupid comment I could come up with would just undermine the vast failure of this campaign. For those of us in Canada, who may not know what the CWM campaign was, let me explain. Edelman made for Wal-Mart a series of ads that portrayed their lovable smiley face as a presidential candidate. He espoused the benefits of having a Wal-Mart in your neighborhood. He wore a suit. He was hated by all. Wal-Mart spent millions on this campaign, and lost millions because of it, making it one of the biggest PR screw ups of all time.

Well, that was depressing, maybe the rest of April will go better