How to destroy your brand in 30seconds

Sir Ed pizza ad 'bad taste'
A halloween pizza promotion depicting Sir Edmund Hillary dancing in a graveyard has upset those closest to him just 10 months after his death. The animation, by Hell Pizza, shows a mostly skeletal Sir Ed, flanked by Heath Ledger and the Queen Mother, emerging from graves to dance to Michael Jackson's song Thriller. It was posted on the Internet two days before Halloween and has been called grotesque by Sir Ed's son, Peter Hillary. "I think it's a bit disturbing ... a little grotesque. I don't think it's funny and I'm not very impressed," Mr Hillary said yesterday. "It is early days and it's still pretty raw. It's extremely poor taste really."

Can you imagine the marketing meeting at Hell Pizza?

Sleazy Marketer: “Okay, we’ve got a great marketing campaign guys”.
Incredibly stupid Pizza Owner: “It won’t be like the Hell Pizza billboard featuring Adolf Hitler that we placed next to a Jewish school in central Auckland will it”?
Sleazy Marketer: “Wasn’t that great? We got so much edgy publicity, this idea is even edgier and it’s on the internet this time so everyone can be offended, not just the Jewish school we placed the Adolf Hitler billboard next to, let’s take one of NZs most beloved sons, who hasn’t even rotted fully in the ground yet, and let’s spoof him and get him to crawl out of the grave and do a little dance with Heath Ledger and the Queens Mum”.
Incredibly stupid Pizza Owner: “Ummmm, won’t that possibly be construed as deeply offensive and create an intense backlash over our brand, shouldn’t we focus on being NZ owned and that we have better pizzas than those awful Dominos and Pizza Hutt pizzas”?
Sleazy Marketer: “Oh sure we COULD do that OR we could potentially offend the entire country by having the rotting corpse of Ed Hillary do a dance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller”.
Incredibly stupid Pizza Owner: “Okay, let’s use the dancing corpse of one of NZs greatest sons to try and sell our pizzas”.
Sleazy Marketer: “Great, you won’t ever regret this”.