We all love a good advertising fail, and no more so than on LinkedIn, where piling on to deride the latest from adland is quite the sport.
The latest advert to get people talk comes from drinks brand Courvoisier. The advert shows band Ezra Collective sitting around in what I suspect is meant to be a cosy scene. For some reason only one of them has an instrument and that instrument is a drum kit.
Text says 'Toast the year with Ezra Collective' and then there's a second tagline that says 'To the moments that make us'. The logo also appears twice, as well as on the bottle and there's a random mention of ginger ale in there that's very easy to miss. I doubt that this offering will make it on to our best billboards list.
It was chief strategy officer Kevin Chesters who brought this to the attention of his LinkedIn followers. He had a lot to say about it, including:
"I MEAN, WHERE DO YOU START?
The meaningless headline?
The generic “sociability” shot?
The ignorable and ignored “serving suggestion” line???
The mandatory bottle AND glass inclusion?
The second headline that means even less than the first?
The third feature of logo and brand just in case you didn’t notice it the first two times, on the left or bottle?
The pointless lower case/script in French to suggest sophistication? (😂😂😂)
Note to self: why are the words in the meaningless headline underlined."
He went on to say he is assuming it was done by AI, and he'd give it a zero out of ten.
The commenters then piled on, with most agreeing with Kevin.
"Such a generic looking ad" said one person. "It's also just a BAD photo" said another, who went on to talk about the eye lines – who/what are they looking at?
"This is actually disorientingly bad" said another commenter, while someone else called it "an absolute shocker".
So there you have it, is this the worst billboard of 2025? There's plenty of competition, including these creepy as hell UK billboards, these provocative billboards and this Apple billboard that turned heads for all the wrong reasons.
