3rd
June
2008
This is a weird one. Honda does what looks like a pretty impressive live TV ad shown here in Britain involving skydivers who jump out of a plane and spell out the letters of H-O-N-D-A while freefalling. Nice job. Next day the plane crashes on an unrelated mission and a couple of people - also unrelated to the Honda ad, lose their lives. It didn't just crash, a wing came off and it went in to a tailspin. Fortunately most of the skydivers made it off. And as Honda was quick to point out, there was no connection with the Honda ad of 24 hours earlier in terms of personnel involved in the accident. But imagine if that had happened live on TV? That 'difficult is worth doing' tagline would have looked pretty ironic in a horribly sick way (as would the TV announcer's introductory line 'hope you're not scared of heights').
And as it is, that ad will always be remembered for what happened a day later, great ad though it undeniably is.
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