Marketing professionals are always looking for clever new strategies to burrow inside your brain and lay eggs that will eventually hatch into impulse purchases. But whether they are deliberately courting controversy (there's no such thing as bad publicity, right?) or just didn't think it through enough, advertising campaigns occasionally backfire in hilarious ways. These are some of those ways.

6 Absolut Vodka Accidentally Advocates a Mexican Invasion of the USA

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In an attempt to cash in on Mexican national pride, Absolut Vodka ran a series of ads in Mexico portraying an 1800s map of North America prior to the Mexican-American War, when several of the Southwestern U.S. states were part of Mexico, captioned "In an Absolut World."

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Couldn't they at least take Oklahoma, too?

Unfortunately, from Mexico's perspective, Absolut was sort of inadvertently promising that buying their liquor would help Mexico take back the United States.

What the Hell Were They Thinking?

What Absolut wasn't really considering was that there are some Mexican-American and Hispanic-American extremists who actually think that Mexico should reclaim parts of the United States, so a campaign like this is kind of the equivalent of a Budweiser commercial that jokes about reparations for slavery. And it probably didn't help that the ad aired right as the United States was beefing up its border security to combat illegal immigration, raising tensions among both sides to the point where they were preparing to dust off the Alamo.

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Because that went so well the first time.

Of course, Absolut promptly apologized in the classiest way possible: with a recorded message on their consumer inquiry phone line, saying "We recognize that people in different parts of the world may lend different perspectives or interpret our ads in a different way than was intended in that market, and for that we apologize." So basically, if you were offended, it's your fault for misunderstanding Absolut's marketing team's intentions, and not Absolut's marketing team's fault for sucking at American history.