Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - Fakevertising

Episode Date: January 17, 2026

The world of marketing has discovered there’s money to be made in creating fake ads.But, they’re not trying to fool you - they’re trying to entertain you. Companies are creating fake ads and fake stores and even fake mistakes - on purpose - in order to gain your attention.The trick is to appear absolutely legitimate.While gently pulling your leg at the same time.We know you want to listen to all the ads in this show. On the off-chance you don’t, subscribe ad-free here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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That's a spicy meatball. What love doesn't conquer. Al-Caseltzer will. You're under the influence with Terry O'Reilly. One day, a comedian named Jeff Wysoski had a cookie idea. He wanted to create fake, absolutely ridiculous products, but designed to look absolutely legitimate. And he wanted to secretly plant these fake products in real grocery and department stores

just to watch the cashier's faces when people tried to buy them. His goal? To confront people with a little absurdity in their boring everyday lives. Wysawski had a marketing background, and he put his creative powers to work. So, for example, he put sauerkraut into a glass bottle and called it showerkraut.

The label said it contained bathroom-aged sauerkraut and showed a photo of a shirtless man eating from a bowl. The label also said, homemade, clean taste, enjoy anywhere. and Wysoski snuck it onto supermarket shelves. His inventions were definitely surprising. One was a hanging package with a label that said, A box I stole off someone's porch.

Under that was a small vacuum-sealed cardboard box from Amazon featuring someone's address on the mailing label. A yellow strip across the bottom of that package said, could be expensive. The entire package looked completely credible. Wysoski created various flavors of lip balm, including wet grass, balonia, shoe leather, and meat, and he snuck them into drugstores.

His ideas were definitely absurd. One was a box called I Hope It's Corn that promised a 25% chance of corn. Another was a transparent ketchup bottle called Barely Any Ketchup. You could see there was less than an inch of ketchup at the bottom, and the label boasted less than one serving and 99% less than the leading brand.

You can only imagine the shopper staring at that in a grocery store. Jeff Wysawski soon found himself creating these fake products as a full-time job. He called his company Obvious Plant. He's been secretly planting these absurd and hilarious products on store shelves for years now. You can follow him on Instagram by searching obvious plant, where he has over 765,000 followers. And you can purchase his crazy products on his website, where they can sell for hundreds of dollars, and many of them are sold out. Wysoski says he'll just keep making this stuff until the earth explodes.

proving one thing, there's money to be had in them fake products. The world of marketing also discovered there's money in them fake products. But instead of just trying to entertain, companies are creating fake ads and fake stores and even fake mistakes on purpose in order to gain attention. And if attention is the oxygen of marketing, fakery can definitely be the lungs. The trick is to appear absolutely legitimate while gently pulling your leg at the same time. You're under the influence.

Recently, in London, England, Mabelene staged a stunt that got millions talking. It placed a giant rubber eyelash onto the front window of a London subway train. When the train entered a certain subway stop, the train would pass by a Mabelie. ad on the subway wall, and protruding from the ad was a giant mascara wand. So as the subway train glided by the ad, the giant mascara wand would brush the giant

eyelash on the front of the train, causing the eyelash to bounce up and down. The stunt created quite the stir online. The video was posted on Instagram and TikTok. It went viral immediately. In no time, there were 45 million views on Instagram, over 2 million likes, and soon the video went global. The press picked up on it, and people posted saying it was a brilliant, innovative idea. But here's the thing.

The stunt was a stunt. People in London rushed around the subway stops looking for the giant lashes and wand, but they couldn't find them. They couldn't find them because that video was fake. An extremely well done fake. Mabelene created that entire video using computer technology. It didn't exist in the real world, just online.

When people reached out to Mabelene to ask about the video, the cosmetics company didn't hide the fact the video was fake. They freely admitted it, and people still loved it. You can see the video for yourself on YouTube by searching Maybelean Subway Mascara. That video attracted huge attention for Mabelene Sky High mascara, and that wasn't all it attracted. It was reported the video generated a 110% year-over-year growth in sales.

Back in 1959, a new glue was introduced in India. It was called Fevacol. Over the years, the glue has become famous for its bonding ability. Its logo is two elephants in a tug of war, trying to pull apart an object glued with Fevacol. Fevacol has become so famous in India that the brand name has become a generic word for adhesives. It now commands 70% of the glue market in India

and is sold in 71 countries. Fevacal achieved this success, not just by creating a good product, it created a famous brand. Consistently, over the years, the ads were funny, simple, and showed the immense sticking power of the glue, making them incredibly popular with the people of India. Recently, Fevacal did something very interesting. The glue company set up a fake pop-up store. in the middle of a busy Mumbai mall. It was called the free store.

Sign said every item was free if you can take it, which was intriguing. Over 80 items were on display from lamps and bowls and vases to small kitchenware items. Nothing attracts people like the word free, but when a crowd of shoppers tried to take the free items off the shelves, they ran into a problem. They couldn't budge them. No matter how hard they grabbed or pulled, they couldn't yank a single item free. The objects were all stuck firmly to the shelves. After about 20 minutes of struggle, the free store signage suddenly changed to say,

Fevacol, the ultimate adhesive. Once that was revealed, the shoppers all laughed. It was a clear demonstration of how well the glue worked, and the fake store was completely in keeping with the humorous Fevacol campaign that had been running for years. 80 items on the shelves, none taken. The long-running campaign is also a tribute to the relationship between Fevacol and its advertising agency Ogilvy. They have been working together since the 1970s, rare in the world of advertising.

Clearly, the brand and the ad agency have an incredible, Bond. When we come back, Snickers makes a big mistake. Snickers has done exceptionally good marketing over the past 15 years. Its worldwide tagline, You're Not You and You're Hungry, has inspired amusing campaigns in countries around the world. The tagline now has a staggering 80% recognition rate,

which means 80% of the general public links the tagline to Snickers. Most brands only dream of those numbers. I went to see the Snickers Director of Marketing speak at a terrific marketing event called The Gathering in Banff, Alberta. He told us that when the You're Not You and Your Hungry campaign was launched in 2010, it completely reversed Snickers declining sales volume, growing at twice the category rate after only three months in the market. sales jumped by $376 million. The reason the

You're Not You and Your Hungry campaign works so well is because that idea can be told in so many different ways. For example, Snickers changed its packaging at one point. Instead of saying Snickers on the wrapping, the bars instead said grumpy or cranky or confused. In another instance, the word Snickers itself was misspelled. So funny. I've mentioned this before, but in Puerto Rico,

37 different radio stations did something that had never been done before. They started playing music they would normally never play one morning. So the rock station suddenly started playing salsa. The salsa station suddenly started playing heavy metal. The hip-hop station started playing opera. It was chaos. The 3.2 million radio listeners were completely confused. Until, that is, Snickers cleared up the confusion by saying,

We apologize for the inconvenience. The DJ is not himself when he's hungry. When he finishes eating his Snickers, we will be back with our regular programming. It was a huge, bold idea that brought the Snickers message to 3.2. million people. One day in France, not long ago, people buying Snickers bars had a rude surprise. When they bit into their Snickers bar, they discovered they were eating a bounty chocolate bar instead.

The packaging said Snickers, but instead of the peanuts, nugut and caramel, people found themselves eating a bounty bar with coconut filling. For the next 24 hours, people all over France started posting about the mistake on social media. Because Mars owns both bounty and Snickers, it was assumed there had been a production screw-up, with bounty bars being put inside Snickers wrappers by mistake. The uproar from the public was quickly given the hashtag Snickersgate. People were posting comments like, whoa, I just had a Snickers and ended up with a bounty. What the F is this? Another said, there's a guy in the Snickers factory right now that must be really feeling the heat.

Hashtag Snickersgate. And that's what everybody thought. 24 hours later, Snickers released a video to social media that showed a Snickers factory worker discovering the production mistake and rushing into the quality control room to give the quality control worker a real Snickers bar. And after he bites into the bar, he jumps up and realizes the mistake. At Snickers, we're not us when we're hungry.

It was a fake mistake. It was just Snickers having fun. The Mars company owns both Snickers and Bounty, so they were able to pull it all off. And it made sure the bars contained the same allergens, so no one was exposed to unexpected health risks during the prank. But that fake mistake got a huge social media reaction. It got 18 million impressions,

which is how many times the story appeared on people's screens. The public engaged with the story 275,000 times on social media, and 98% of those comments were positive. Triple the rate of engagement Snickers usually gets. The press unanimously loved the stunt too, saying it was Snickers' most ambitious gag to do. date. The fake mistake then went viral. It's estimated that 65 million people heard about Snickersgate around the world. One day, two young Asian men named Jev Mara Villa and Christian Toledo were eating

at their local McDonald's. As they were chatting, they noticed the posters on the walls. They all featured various McDonald's employees and customers, all smiling while enjoying hamburgers and fries, which were circled on the posters. But they also noticed that the posters didn't feature any Asian people, so they concoct it a plan. They would smuggle in a fake poster featuring themselves into the McDonald's location and hang it up without anyone noticing. Jev managed to find an old McDonald's employee shirt at a local thrift shop.

Then Jev and Christian took a photo of them. in the same kind of pose as the other posters and edited it to match the other pictures in size and style and ordered it online. When it arrived, they carefully put the same kind of dotted circle around the fries Jev was holding. It was a perfect imitation of all the other McDonald's posters. Now the trick was to smuggle it into McDonald's.

So in July, they slipped the large foe, into the McDonald's and waited for the coast to clear. One hour later, they found themselves alone in the corner, so they put the poster up on the wall, where it went undetected for two full months. Then in September, Jev tweeted about the stunt, along with a photo of the fake poster. That tweet was liked by nearly one million people

and retweeted almost 600,000 times. He also posted a short video about the stunt on YouTube, where it was watched by thousands more. Not long after, Jev got a call from McDonald's. He immediately sensed trouble. But on that call, an executive from McDonald's told Jeff that they, in fact, loved the poster and invited Jev and Christian to an event at the restaurant.

The restaurant was to be closed soon for renovations, but he asked Jev and Christian to come in and sign the poster, which was to be auctioned off to raise money for Ronald McDonald House. Soon, news outlets were covering the story. That press caught the attention of Ellen DeGeneres, and she invited them to appear on her show. Jev and Christian couldn't believe this was all happening. On the show, they told Ellen the story behind the fake poster.

Ellen then told them that McDonald's was going to put them both in a marketing campaign. And because they were going to be starring in a marketing campaign, McDonald's had to pay them. So, she presented each of them with a check for $25,000. While acknowledging that the stunt was a lot of fun and the $50,000 was amazing, Jev made it clear there was a serious point to be made about Asian representation in society. whether in movies or television or fast food restaurants. The poster was fake, but the issue wasn't.

When we come back, fashion influencers get fooled. Back in 2017, the news stories about pay less shoes weren't good. The bargain shoe retailer had filed for bankruptcy, reportedly shuddering 700 stores. But it managed to re-emerge, from bankruptcy and continued doing business, but revenues were shrinking. The main problem was that shoppers didn't think Payless discount stores offered fashionable shoe wear. They linked discount with boring.

So Payless decided to change that perception. And here's what they did. Payless decided to open a fake store featuring a fake luxury brand and hold a fake launch party and invite real social media influencers to that party. But first, they needed a location. Their advertising agency found a former Giorgio Armani store location in an upscale mall. The neighboring stores were Louis Vuitton, Barneys, and Tiffany's.

Payless then hired an interior designer to create an authentic, luxurious atmosphere for the launch party. The fake store now needed a name. So the ad agency creative director went to Wikipedia to look up Italian surnames. He found one he liked, a lessee. So he just added a capital P to the name, Plessy, which was kind of funny. They created a fake paylessy website and Instagram account because they knew the social media influencers would be checking them out before attending.

They filled the store with the latest pay lessee. shoes and boots, but covered the Payless brand name with stickers that said paylessy in clean black font. Then they took shoes priced at 1999 and put a $200 price tag on them. Shoes that cost $3999 were priced at $600, and some other shoes were even priced at an 1,800-markup. Next, Social Media. of fashion influencers were invited to the launch party.

They were told a store was opening, featuring a new brand by Italian fashion designer Bruno Pelesi, and that the company was looking for some feedback. Over 60 fashionistas, RSVP'd. As those influencers strolled through the store that night, checking out the new merchandise, stylish salespeople asked them what they thought of the footwear, and wandering video cameras captured their responses.

The fashionista said the Pellesi shoes were just stunning. They said Pellessi takes your shoe game up to the next level. One influencer gushed saying, This Italian designer is amazing. Another said the shoes were elegant and sophisticated. I can tell they were made with high-quality materials. I would pay 400, 500. Yeah. People are going to be like,

Where'd you get those? These experienced fashion influencers were so impressed. Many of them purchased shoes that night, spending as much as $645 for a pair of stilettos that normally would sell it pay less for $39.99. But when an influencer made a purchase, they were then taken backstage and told that the Paylessy brand was fake. These are actually from Payless.

Shut up. Are you serious? The social media influencers were given their money back and were allowed to keep the shoes they had chosen for free. They all admitted that payless had fooled them absolutely and completely. The shock on their faces made for some powerful payless commercials, which created buzz just in time for Christmas. We built a fake luxury store in Los Angeles

and filled it with payless shoes. The guests at our grand opening party had no one. idea. They're elegant, sophisticated. I just think it's so classy. And I can tell it was made with high quality of material. These fashionistas actually paid $200, $400, and even $600 for Pay Less shoes. But you can get these same shoes at Pay Less for 1999 or lower with our epic holiday deals. Why pay more when you can pay less? The prank exposed a very interesting point. Most people can't detect real luxury. Upscale items are far more about perceived value than actual value. We judge value by association.

When the pay less shoes were presented in a former Armani store, in an upscale mall with stylish salespeople and upscale neighbors, those experienced influencers instantly transferred that luxury association to the shoes and didn't bat an eye at the inflated prices. It posed the question, If a shoe is stylishly designed but bargain priced, is it still fashionable? And that was the point Payless was making. It reminded shoppers that affordable shoes can be fashionable too.

Some criticized the prank, saying it wouldn't attract upscale wealthy customers. But that wasn't the goal. The goal was to attract regular people who wanted to find fashionable footwear but couldn't afford luxury. And if the styles fooled influencers who were paid to spot fashion trends, that was a very convincing reason to shop at pay less. The word fake is having a moment in our world these days, from fake news and misinformation to AI-generated fake photos and videos. We are living in a post-truth world. On the other hand, Mark, Mark, marketers are using fake ideas, not to cheat you, but to generate press by making you smile or to make a point.

The paylessy prank says something very powerful about marketing. The influencers believe they were purchasing luxury footwear because they were fed an array of social and environmental cues. It showed how our shopping behavior can be influenced by factors that have nothing to do with the actual product itself. The fake Snickers mistake was perfectly in keeping with its amusing You're not you and your hungry campaign. But what an ambitious gag that was. Fevacol used a fake store to prove how remarkable its glue legitimately is. And the fake Mabelene ads were simply meant to entertain.

But they also demonstrated that today, advertisers can create eye-popping videos using AI without the expensive production, location, and film crews. It's becoming a whole new ad world. And Hollywood has come knocking on comedian Jeff Wysawski's door, proving you can fake it and make it when you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly.

This episode was recorded in the Terstream Mobile Recording Studio, producer Debbie O'Reilly, Chief Sound Engineer Jeff Devine. Research, Shea Grinden. Theme by Casey Pick, Jeremiah Pick, and James Aiton. Tunage, provided by APM music. Follow me at Terry O. Influence. This podcast is powered by ACAST.

Terry's top slogans of all time. Number 21. Wheaties. The Breakfast of Champions. See you next week.