Weirdest Ad Campaigns, Ranked

Advertising can be amazing. In rare cases, the best advertisements can leave you emotional. In the worst instances, they can leave you disgusted.

Most leave you feeling nothing at all. But some of them make you pause, cause you to tilt your head and go, “Huh?” These ads are the latter — from commercials to print ads, these ad agencies skipped the traditional route and went down the road of the bizarre. 

Mountain Dew’s hypnotic Puppy Monkey Baby commercial was broadcast to millions of homes during Super Bowl 50, and it probably left more than one viewer thinking they just experienced a strange hallucination.

The ad features a few guys hanging out on the couch shortly before a monkey/pug/baby thing from “The Island of Doctor Moreau” pops through the wall, plops down an ice bucket of Mountain Dew Kickstart drinks, and says “puppy monkey baby” over and over again.

Are you pregnant? You could have received 50 percent off of an Ikea crib in 2018, but you’d have to prove it first.

Designed by Swedish ad agency Akestam Holst, this print ad had a pee strip pregnancy test, which also reveals a reduced crib price — but only if you were a member of Ikea’s Family Club program.

With the threat of nuclear annihilation waning during the later years of the Cold War, advertisers took aim at the Russians.

In 1985, Wendy’s took a shot at the conformity of communism with a Soviet fashion show parody where a woman marches down the runway three times to model daywear, eveningwear and swimwear. Each time, she’s wearing the same unflattering, potato-sack-looking dress (although she carries a beach ball at the end). The entire 60-second commercial is weird and wonderful.

These “Born to Fish” ads for Okuma, a fishing company headquartered in Taiwan, merged babies with old grizzled sailors.

The New Zealand marketing agency Barnes Catmur & Friends designed these simple and strange print ads.