Hitman’s unorthodox advertising campaign spectacularly backfires

Christopher Hooton
Monday 07 March 2016 16:00 GMT
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(@graceblaise)

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Given protagonist Agent 47’s penchant for silently killing people and stashing their bodies in bathrooms, the marketing department at Square Enix thought it would be fun to advertise the latest Hitman game by having pools of fake blood spill from underneath a set of stalls.

It was a nicefun idea, but unfortunately they didn’t think it all the way through, and it would seem the ambiguity of this particular placement wasn't picked up by anyone:

Twitter user @GraceBlaise took the photos (presumably in her native London) on 5 March, and a day later she “returned to the scene of the crime” and found the adverts still in place.

“Those ads are in the boys' toilets too so I hear,” she added.

As advertising gaffes go it’s pretty bad, but nowhere near as egregious as that time Sainsbury’s showed shoppers how to ‘get the slave look’ with 12 Years A Slave display mannequins.

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