Marketing isn't complicated: Use a lot of bright colors, commission a catchy jingle, slap some breasts up there right next to the blandly inoffensive product name and then collect your paycheck and go home to cry in the dark about the ultimate meaninglessness of your career and life in general. It's not rocket science. In fact, as long as your product doesn't share a name with a horrible disease and you don't hand over complete creative control to people who actively hate your company, you should be all set. Unfortunately, sometimes the marketing people just show up to work drunk and do exactly that.

5 Ayds

During the 1970s and '80s, Ayds diet candy was riding high: The butterscotch, chocolate and various other flavored diet candies somehow fooled the public into thinking they actually worked, and the owners had enough of that sweet sugar money rolling in to choke a whole squadron of Oompa Loompas. But just as the CEOs mounted a pile of tiny dead orange strippers to proclaim the invincibility of their confectionery empire to the world, the AIDS epidemic hit, and shit stopped being funny in a hurry.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Then, 30 years later, it got kind of funny again:

Via Hark.com

"How about we change the name to Cancer?"

But despite the product now sharing a name with a modern-day plague, the manufacturer of Ayds decided to stick it out, operating on Michael Bolton of Office Space's principle of "AIDS is the one that sucks, so they're the one that should change." The company so obstinately refused to acknowledge the problem that they didn't even alter their now seriously questionable tagline: "Ayds helps you take off weight and helps you keep it off." And the candy company kept this up as AIDS ravaged the modern world around them, all the while quietly insisting that this whole pandemic thing would blow over and history would only remember the real Ayds. For evidence of how well that plan worked, take a look at this commercial, and count how many blackly hilarious double-entendres you catch in its roughly 30-second run time: