The 2024 Ads and Campaigns That Broke Me: An Irreverent Retrospective
Marketing is supposed to inspire us, delight us, or at least sell us something without making us cringe too hard. But every now and then, a campaign comes along that makes you sit back, stare at the ceiling, and question everything—your sanity, your life choices, and whether humanity deserves Wi-Fi. Here’s my roast of six 2024 campaigns that made me want to move into a cave with no ads, no internet, and definitely no cereal for dinner.
1. The Totally Mismatched It Ends With Us Marketing Campaign
What’s worse than a bad book-to-film adaptation? A marketing campaign so far removed from the source material it feels like it was designed for an alternate universe. It Ends With Us, a harrowing, emotional story, got… pastel colors, flower crowns, and ads that screamed “quirky rom-com!” You know, the vibe you definitely want when dealing with generational trauma and domestic abuse.
I get it—people love a good “marketing team misunderstood the brief” fiasco. But this was next level. It was like someone said, “What if The Notebook was directed by the Instagram algorithm?” Watching this campaign unfold felt like being invited to a birthday party that turned out to be a funeral. Thanks, but no thanks.
2. The Bumble Anti-Celibacy Ads
Apparently, Bumble decided that 2024 was the year to go all in on “anti-celibacy.” The campaign featured multiple scenarios in which they were encouraging women to make the first move on dating apps, a feature of Bumble specifically being that women are required to, but one stuck out as particularly tone-deaf, lecturing the reader that “You know full well a vow of celibacy is not the answer.”
In a world where access to safe and affordable birth control, much less abortion, is a terrifying reality for so many women, it’s safe to say no one fucked with these ads. Not to even get into intimate partner violence, maternal death rates soaring in the US, and the bizarrely anti-asexual slant. These ads, amusingly, did not feel like they were written by or for women at all.
3. The Google AI Ad
Oh, Google. When you’re the overlord of all information, you’d think you’d know how to craft an ad that doesn’t feel like it was written by AI for an audience of AI. Their 2024 campaign boasted about Google AI’s ability to “revolutionize your life,” but the ad’s execution was so dystopian that I half-expected Black Mirror to sponsor it.
The real flop came in the form of a commercial about a young girl using Google Gemini AI to write a fan letter to her Olympic idol, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. Because truly, at this point, not even childhood fan letters are sacred. A spokesperson for Google said that, despite the ads testing well, they would be pulling their ads from rotation. I suppose this also served as a good beta test for if their “use Gemini to write your letters to Santa” ad would resonate with audiences. But don’t worry, it wouldn’t even be the worst AI Christmas ad this year. More on that later…
4. The Kellogg’s Cereal for Dinner Ad
Apparently, Kellogg’s thinks we’re so defeated by life that cereal for dinner needs its own campaign. Their ads showed a family prepping for dinner, only to have Tony the Tiger bust into the room Kool-Aid man style to rally a cheer for the family as they prepare to eat cereal for dinner. They are then joined by a chicken briefly so the mom can tell the chicken to eff off, I guess.
It’s hard to pinpoint where this one lost me. On one hand, eating cereal for dinner is rarely a “woohoo!” event for me so much as it is a “well… I’m old enough to make my own choices” kind of situation. On the other, it’s actually wild to suggest that families, in a time when groceries have gotten more expensive than ever, shirk nutrition in favor of cost-cutting (I guess) Frosted Flakes and Mini Wheats.
5. The “He Gets Us” Feet Washing Ads
Religious marketing is always a delicate dance, but the “He Gets Us” campaign decided to dive headfirst into the deep end with its focus on feet washing. The premise? Jesus washed feet, so you should… do something. The ads never really made it clear.
I honestly struggled to even include the image for this ad on this blog post because, dear reader, despite my desire for more traffic to this website, I don’t know that I wanted that kind of traffic. The allusion is obviously to how Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, but the visual seemed to relish just a little bit too much on the act and made me wonder if in fact some creative at the Agency they are working with just had a fascination he felt like he needed to get out. I left these ads more confused than converted.
6. The Coca-Cola Christmas Ads
And here it is, the mother of all AI fumbles. Coca-Cola decided this year to toss away decades of brand-building to embrace the cold, chrome-coated future by employing AI for it’s Christmas ads.
That’s it, kids. That’s the tweet. A company known for nearly a century of cozy, Americana-esque ads, sometimes even famously hand painted depictions of Santa Claus were all thrown into a blender so that we could be fed a slurry of images once crafted by humans, now served to us from a microplastic infused coke bottle.
The best part? If you pay attention to some of the delivery trucks, the logo doesn’t even render properly, reminding us all that, no matter how much time and effort you have spent preserving your gorgeous iconography, none of it will be safe from the cost cutting measures a company will do to save a buck.
Final Thoughts
These campaigns didn’t just miss the mark—they broke it, stomped on it, and buried it six feet under. But hey, maybe that’s the real genius of advertising: even when it’s bad, it gets us talking. And laughing. And pouring cereal for dinner, because apparently, that’s just where we are now.
Here’s to 2025—may the ads be ever in your favor.