Red Bull Jesus – PR Fail

red-bull-jesus

Here is another great example of bad marketing and advertising. Offend the two major global faiths to sell more of your stuff.Red Bull and the advertising agency involved certainly succeeded. Why don’t companies get that someone doesn’t have to lose for you to win? Did they think it was a good idea to be disrespectful and ridicule Jesus, who a good proportion of their target audience worships?

Besides the offensive nature of this advert, this is a sad example of a self-indulgent art director creating for themselves. They clearly didn’t think about what would happen and that they would offend many in their own target audience. If I was Red Bull I’d be really annoyed.

This is such bad PR fail. An ad for the South African market that gets global headlines. Good for those that think all PR is good PR. Bad if you think negative PR can hurt your brand. Which I think it does.

Are you a Christian and a Red Bull drinker? What do you think? Comment below.

 

 

 

3 comments

  1. I’m a long-time fan of Red Bull as a brand (and the drink), and a Christian. I can see why the ad will have offended a certain amount of Christian viewers, but ultimately it was created in a secular market, for a secular market.

    As Christians we can have two potential responses to the ad: a) get all up in arms, bombard Red Bull with negativity and show the world what they think: that Christians are humourless and narrow-minded; or b) accept the ad for what it is, move on and concentrate on being ‘a light to the world’.

    Personally I choose the latter – especially considering that the ad has been pulled. Red Bull will continue to grow and succeed, even after a bit of bad PR. Let’s face it, companies have done a lot worse.

    1. Thanks for your thoughts Chris!

      I’m probably in the ‘B’ camp myself, \the angle I was coming from was that businesses don’t go out of their way to intentionally annoy their target audience and I think Red Bull and the agency concerned probably don’t understand how sensitive some of their own target audience are when commercialism intersects with depicting a persons faith.

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