Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Ad Graveyard

<funhouse: ad graveyard>

It sucks.

Rejected Print ad, 1999. Creative team: unknown. Agency: Alteon internal technical group. Client: Alteon internal marketing group. Cause of death: "Hahahah, that's great. You're kidding, right?" MORE »

Reader Jordan Hubbard explains:

I'm not in the advertising business, I simply scooped this advertisement off the company's web site after someone forwarded me an odd URL pointing somewhere into the bowels of www.alteon.com (now Alteon web systems).

I found it quite amusing and labored under the impression that it was an advert which had actually run until I happened to run into the Alteon booth at a COMDEX show in Las Vegas. Upon inquiring about the advert, I was quickly directed to an individual also at the booth, whose name sadly now escapes me, in order that I might actually shake the hand of the man responsible for the image. I did so and quickly learned the true story of the advert's life at Alteon:

It seems the advert "escaped" onto the web site for a short time but was never actually run, it having been killed by the company's own marketing group the moment it was proposed. A slightly less graphic but still controversial advert by the same individual which showed a girl with a pierced tongue and a number of other facial deformations was run instead, all in an attempt to show the "wild side" of Alteon's gigabit routing technology. One suspects that the rejected advert was simply a little too wild for the marketing department's tastes.—Jordan Hubbard