2026 is the year of the cancelled ad
by https://www.creativebloq.com/author/tom-may · Creative Bloq
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If you work in advertising, 2026 has probably felt like a nervous year. Barely a month has gone by without another campaign being criticised, picked apart and, often, cancelled with a hastily written apology.
In July, Pepsi posted a line of copy on Threads that read: "Pepsi Wild Cherry is what happens when regular cherry stops asking permission." At surface level, they were talking about the flavour of a soft drink. But some interpreted it as a joke about consent, and the post was deleted within hours.
The following month, a 60-second ad for golfing brand Callaway showed a man violently shoving a woman to the ground. It was meant to be a parody of the horror film Obsession, but if you'd not seen the film, it looked horrific. After howls of protest, the clip was deleted the same day.
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In September, we got a Sydney Sweeney controversy. (Yes, another one.) Under the tagline "just sports", the actor appeared without any clothing, covering her body solely in footballs, basketballs and sporting equipment.
Female athletes lined up to criticise the ad for sports prediction company Novig, with Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus calling it "a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft".
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In the same month, football club Oxford United launched an American-style clothing range bearing the words "United 93" to mark its founding year of 1893. No one, it seems, had made the connection that United 93 was the call sign of one of the planes hijacked on 9/11, made world-famous by the 2006 film of the same name.
What's worse, the range was trailed for launch on 11 September, the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
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Then there was the sneaker brand Converse, which posted an Instagram image of K-pop star Karina promoting its Chuck 70 X trainers. In the shot, a star-shaped spotlight created a triangular white shape on her skirt that resembled a KKK hood. Again, condemnation came thick and fast.
So what, exactly, is going on here?
Accident or intent?
Line these ads up side by side and it's clear they're not all the same kind of failure. Oxford United and Converse look like genuine accidents: you'd have to be pretty paranoid to think either brand deliberately set out to reference 9/11 or the KKK in its content. The issue, though, is whether they should have spotted the potential for offence.
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With the benefit of hindsight, the answer cannot be anything other than yes. At the same time, it might be glib, but I'm going to say it anyway... everyone makes mistakes.
I'm by no means immune to this myself. About 20 years ago I wrote a review of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for a women's magazine, and mistyped it as Lord of the Rings: The Twin Towers; another accidental reference to 9/11. A dozen colleagues also failed to spot the error and it got printed, in the days when print circulations ran into the millions. Not exactly a career highlight.
The Sydney Sweeney ad for Novig, though, is something different. Its chief executive, Jacob Fortinsky, has clearly stated that the campaign "forces us into the national discourse", suggesting they were not surprised by the backlash but were deliberately trying to stir things up.
Pepsi and Good Good Golf sit somewhere in the middle of the two extremes. On paper at least, neither brand set out to stir up a backlash. But at the same time, both were deliberately trying to be edgy, and edgy content typically leaves far less room for error.
Changing landscape
So are brands being sloppy, or are audiences overly sensitive? I actually think this is a false dichotomy, and we should start thinking about these controversies in a different way. My question is this: in general, does anyone actually care about ads any more? Like, at all?
For context, when I grew up in the 1970s, ads were the topic of conversation, along with the weather and the price of milk (there was a lot of inflation back then). "Have you seen that ad where…?", you'd ask your mates, and they'd invariably say yes. The jingles, the slogans, the stories that formed TV ads of that era were literally better known than the shows they interrupted.
But think of three TV ads you could describe to your friend today that they'd all know about. My guess is you can't. And that's no accident; it's a symptom of how we consume media in 2026.
We rarely go to the cinema. Few buy printed newspapers or magazines. The broadcast TV that once dominated family life has largely been replaced by ad-free streaming. We even browse the web with ad blockers.
Pulled towards controversy
In that light, is it any wonder some brands specifically go out to stir up controversies, even if they risk being cancelled? Or that, even when controversies erupt by accident, companies think: "Unfortunate, but not the end of the world…" Because in the words of Oscar Wilde, "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
Perhaps the answer to my headline, then, is neither soft audiences nor sloppy brands. It's that ads have simply stopped being things we watch, and become things we argue about instead.
Which means if you don't personally like getting drawn into massive rows, you might want to start skipping the ads… even more than you do already.