May 16th 2009
15 Unfortunately Placed Ads
P
araphrasing the Stones, you don’t always get the placement you want. Sometimes, like above, ad juxtaposition can turn out pretty darn funny. At other times, the results can be downright appalling – like the article on the toddler killed in a house fire bumped up against the ad headlined “Burn, Baby Burn!”
See more examples of weird juxtapositions here.
Somehow, this all reminds me of what was supposedly the most nefarious newspaper headline of all time. Journalistic mythology – or maybe history – says it appeared over a story about an insane asylum inmate who broke out, then broke into a house and raped a woman. The headline?
Nut Bolts, Screws
Myth? Fact? Who knows? Probably the former. But here’s one that is real; I can attest to that personally. Elder Brother spent a summer as a copy editor for The Shipping and Trade News, an English-language Tokyo newspaper full of, you know, news about shipping and trading. One day he was tasked with editing and writing the headline for a story about a spiffy new sewage barge Tokyo had just put into service, replacing an older barge whose mechanical bucket just wasn’t capable of keeping up with the monstrous amounts of raw sewage waiting to be dumped into the once-pristine waters of Tokyo Bay. His headline? For real:
The Rise and Fall of the Turd Winch
Hat-tip for the unfortunately placed ad link: Incredible Daughter #1
Posted in Advertising | 2 Comments » | |
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May 16th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
The way I heard it many, many years ago was that the lunatic broke into a laundry and raped a woman there, hence, “Nut bolts, screws washer”.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
The headline gained nothing from me editing! Thanks for showing that bad taste can always be made worse.