A Halloween Promotion Disaster Detailed in 14 Easy Steps

"Not only am I a terrible copywriter but my client actually approved this shit." That's the apparent confession of a DeVito Verdi New York creative during a Copywriters Anonymous meeting earlier this week. The copywriter was referring to recent television commercial created for client Meijer, a Midwest-based retailer. You can view the disaster here.

But that's not what we're really talking about here. The retailer recently launched a Halloween promotion that, OMG, lets you make a video of yourself wearing a Halloween mask! It's really easy. Here's what you do.

1. Fire up your webcam (Oops, don't have one)
2. Go to http://meijerhalloween.com and oops. You have to give Adobe Flash Player permission to access your webcam and microphone which you don't have. No worries, we'll just check it out anyway.
3. Click Allow and oops. "Total Immersion D'Fusion Web Plug-in Installation Required." Say what? Never heard of that. (Why do we need yet another plug in when Flash would have worked just fine?)
4. Throw your hands up and download the plug in anyway.
5. Refresh.
6. View screen as it reload and, again, tells you, "Total Immersion D'Fusion Web Plug-in Installation Required." (Um, say what? We already did that.)
7. Oh wait. Note onscreen verbiage, "You have to manually launch it."
8. Proceed to waste more time digging around your hard drive to find out where exactly that weird ass plug in downloaded to.
9. Give up and move on with your day.

And if you're the one reviewing this less than wonderful Halloween promotion:

10. Feel sorry for the creator who sent you the work and link to what one of these video creations would look like.
11. View the video and, again, feel sorry for the person who sent you this work because you know them.
12. Don't publicly out them because your not a dick and don't want to hurt their feelings by telling them this is one of the lamest pieces of shit you've reviewed in a long time.
13. Have second thoughts about mentioning this at all.
14. Then click the Publish button. Because it's your job.