When advertising goes wrong! 13 real examples of shocking, embarrassing and funny ad blunders from newspapers, magazines, websites and billboards…

Adverts in magazines, newspapers and websites all interact (whether they like it or not) with the space they’re in…

So a travel agent will try and get their pitch for 5 star holidays in the travel section of the newspaper – it makes sense, it’s relevant to readers. A similar thing happens online but these days there are increasingly clever algorithms that scan and analyse text on a page and then display specific adverts according to the information it finds.

This is called ‘contextual advertising’ because it displays adverts within a website in context. Google uses it with great success using their AdSense platform. It’s why when you’re reading an article on, for example, ‘cameras’ you might find the page littered with sidebar adverts for lenses or tripods. The problem is sometimes the computer gets it wrong. It picks up the right words but in the wrong context and suddenly the advert on the page interacts with the content in a shocking, ridiculous or downright hilarious faux pas.

Here are 13 of the best examples I’ve found. Most of these are from websites but some are unfortunate bloopers from print media and elsewhere.

Put your cringe glasses on, here are some examples of where advert placement has gone horribly wrong…