Seriously, people. Your watermarks are bad and you should feel bad.

Everyone’s familiar with the branding disaster involved when Chevy tried to introduce its Nova to the Latin American market (“no va” means “doesn’t go” in Spanish).

However, did you know that Pepsi inadvertently tried to sell its cola to the Taiwanese market under the promise that it’d reanimate their grandparents?

According to Brand Failures a book by Matt Haig, Pepsi’s “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation” came out “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead”.

Another example of marketing departments not making localization a priority happened when Gerber made its first foray into the African baby food market. They didn’t bother to translate the English on the jars of baby food, leaving the locals to make an assumption as to their contents based on nothing but the picture of the baby on the labels.

Which is funny because said contents probably do resemble mashed baby anyway.

I own way too many Internet domains that I’ve done nothing with, so I figured I’d keep tabs on the ones I almost bought.

This is the most recent, as of this morning. I didn’t buy IMNSFHO.com because in my not so fucking humble opinion, I’d probably get more use out of a salad at Applebee’s.

Especially when your jujitsu coach is on Facebook:

So having just posted the Tesla Coil version of the Super Mario Bros. themesong (below) I went back to do some work on the advertising on my other sites. I’ve been looking into Chitika’s new “Premium Ads” which only show to US search engine traffic and decided to give them a go since the sites are well SEO’d.

Now I’m one of those guys who’s compelled to push every button on a thing just to see what it does. So when I was presented with this screen on the publisher control panel, I clicked both options just to see what would happen even though I was going to make an ad:

And this is, no lie, what it linked to:

Apparently Chitika has a /b/tard on staff somewhere. I might just have to run more of their ads on principle.

Also, I was going to embed that video but it turns out that every single Rick Astley “Never Gonna Give You Up” or “Rickroll” video on YouTube has embedding disabled for some reason. OMG Conspiracy.

Except this one: