#5 Top Spokesperson Who Have Come and Gone: Pets.com Sock Puppet

“What goes up, must come down.” Sadly, our little sock puppet had no idea he just sealed his own fate in one of our featured videos.

Pets.com was one of the fastest growing dot-com brands and had the sock puppet to thank for it. Ad Age reported that the sock puppet appeared in a Superbowl commercial, the first dot-com company to appear in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, and had such a following that people were e-mailing them DEMANDING to buy their own sock puppet. This sock puppet was on top of the world.

If you can, not only, have people watch your commercial, but DEMAND to have a piece of your creative, you as an advertiser have done your job and ten fold.

Unfortunately, something called “Fiscal Responsibility” did not renovate in Pets.com vocabulary.

The lure of this rising icon was too much of a temptation to spend, spend, spend on advertising. The brilliant contributors of Wikipedia shared that with the year and half of the start and failure of Pets.com, their earned revenues were $169,000 and managed to spend $11.8 million dollars in advertising. This would explain why CNET deemed it the greatest defunct websites.

This Rome that was built in a day and was destroyed the next day brought so much awe and head scratching to the public that Pets.com memorabilia, such as stock certificates and replicas of the sock puppet, became a hot ticket item on eBay.

To continue to add insult to injury, Pets.com was in a lawsuit against a writer of Conan O’Brien over the sock puppet. The sock puppet was accused of being too similar to Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, and had a cease and desist order placed on them. So what do you do when you’re losing money? You sue them back!

Because of how fast the Pets.com sock puppet was able to build the brand, be the face of a spectacular blunder, and have some great drama in the courtroom, the Pets.com sock puppet is #5 on the top spokesperson who has come and gone.