2009 was a rough year for marketers. Budgets were cut, heads rolled, and projects came under tighter scrutiny than ever before. So, in such a high-stakes climate, mistakes and missteps  would be few and far between, right? Not so. The following awkward, painful, bizarre, and embarrassing marketing blunders show that even with the odds stacked against them, marketers both big and small will dare to dream the impossible dream (and pay the price in the end).

[10] Chevy Volt Dance

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Embarrassing? Check. Awkward? Check. Painful? Check. Bizarre? Check And lucky for us, this was released before 2009 was up, so it makes the list.

Perhaps Autoextremist Peter D. Lorenzo put it best: A job qualification for GM’s new CEO would be “…somebody who would would fire everyone directly responsible for the ‘Chevy Volt Dance’ and even more important, understand the reasons why it never should have seen the light of day.”

GM killed the EV1, its ground-breaking electric car, with sheer marketing ineptitude in 1999. In 2009 GM did its best to abort its ground-breaking serial hybrid, the Volt, with this bit of marketing ineptitude.

[9] Windows 7 Launch Party

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How to make an OS launch like a Tupperware party: a warm, fuzzy, diverse, and welcoming Tupperware party…

This is for those who thought that Gates and Co. could only move up after the company’s $300 million dud of an ad camapaign last year. Remember that campaign? It co-starred comedian Jerry Seinfeld and the man himself, Bill Gates, in a 90-second TV spot beginning in a shoe store and ending with the promise of a “delicious” future.

2009 delivered that future in the form of a Windows 7 launch campaign that, despite taking place in a kitchen, was anything but delicious.

[8] GM Reinvention (and its various spoofs):

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USA! USA! Um… not so much. Here we have GM bouncing back from federally mandated bankruptcy restructuring with a message to the American people, its new owners.

And that message apparently had something to do with amputees and butterflies, but beyond that, we’re a little hazy on the details.

[7] Chia Obama

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Really? The 2008 commemorative plate was too stuffy for you? Maybe you bought one and liked it, but just didn’t feel like it gave you enough Obama pride to carry you through 2009?

Well, our perennial friends at chi-chi-chi-chia came up with the answer in 2009, and boy did they hit this one out of the park.

[6] PETA Pet Shop Boys Name Change Request

Shoot for the stars, end up in the circular file.

While the Pet Shop Boys may have had a popular song (“I Want a Dog”), PETA, as is often the case, wasn’t satsified. In a bold attempt at rebranding by proxy, PETA made a teeny, weeny request of the boys. The result? Lots of free publicity for PETA, but not a whole lot of feel-good credibility to go along with it.

[5] Whole Foods CEO on Single Payer Healthcare Reform

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This is Tendo strategy 101: Take the time to understand your audience. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey let all those commie, leftie, pinko Prius-driving shoppers of his know just where he stood on single payer healthcare reform, and the results that followed did not spur a rush to buy organic humus or premium, extra-firm tofu.

At least we give him props for taking a stand on something, speaking his mind, and being transparent about his beliefs–and frankly, that counts for a lot (and it kept him off the bottom of our list, despite the magnitude of this blunder).

(4) Visit Denmark, Conceive a Child

What better way to woo travelers to visit the Scandanavian land of fair-haired maidens than the promise of a one-night stand and a cute, illegitimate love child as a souvenir?

Tendo covered this in our blog when it first came out (that’s right, you read it here first), but the upshot is the Danish tourism board thought a suberversive viral featuring an attractive mother looking for the father of her baby was the hot ticket to encourage tourism to Denmark. Points for thinking outside of the box here, but…

[3] The Shake Weight

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‘Nuff said.

[2] Amazon Deletes 1984 from Kindle

George Orwell predicted it. In what can only be called the consummate product marketing debacle of 2009, Amazon went Big Brother on its Kindle users–literally–by surreptitiously deleting what they believed to be unauthorized copies of Orwell’s classics, 1984 and Animal Farm, from their Kindle devices. This heaping bowl of “not good” had all the irony of, um, something with a lot of irony.

[1] Balloon Boy

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When promoting your reality show concept gets away from you, as it were.

Robert Thomas, a Colorado State University student and paid assistant to Balloon Boy’s dad, Richard Heene, revealed the high-flying scare that captured worldwide attention to be a misguided, guerilla-style publicty stunt to promote Heene’s reality show pitch. According to CNN, “Thomas said that at one point they were talking about the Roswell UFO incident of the late 1940s when Heene said it would be easy to cook up a media stunt that would be equally profound as Roswell–and we could do so with nothing more than a weather balloon and some controversy.’”

They created a video—later discovered to be a hoax—that they posted on their YouTube channel. It features a Danish woman (an actress, as it turns out) holding a baby. She is talking to the baby’s father, a man she says met in a bar in Copenhagen and had a one-night stand with. She doesn’t want money or anything from him, she says, she just wants to find him and tell him about their son. Her final plea in the video is for him—or anyone who may know him—to get in touch with her.

According to a Danish news site, VisitDenmark CEO Dorte Kiilerich had this to say in a press release: “We deeply apologise that the film has offended a lot of people—that certainly wasn’t the idea. The idea was to create a positive view of Denmark. In order not to continue offending people, we have removed the film from YouTube.”

I wasn’t offended by the video, but the explanation is a little offensive to anyone of average intelligence because the agency is not ‘fessing up about its goals. Rather than contributing to a positive view of Denmark, these marketers were trying to do something controversial to get people talking about Denmark and create some online publicity. Clearly, at some point they realized that any publicity is NOT good publicity.

Apparently overnight stays in the country are on the downswing—perhaps the Little Mermaid and Tivoli Gardens are a tough sell—but still. Sending out a message to travelers that Denmark has attractive blondes who like one-night stands? I don’t think that strategy belongs in the marketing playbook.