Besides, AIDS is not Ayds fault anyway. Director Andrew Stanton explained to the site Bleedingcool.com that girls would not have gone to see a movie with "Mars" in the title. I don’t have their financial statements, but I think the reason the company waited until 1999 to think about changing their name is because maybe it was more costly to change the name and remarket their product than to keep it because of a little bad press. Originally marketed in the 1930s, the appetite suppressant candy Ayds suffered in … How many customers are actually going to walk into a store and say that? • Ayds is a discontinued appetite suppressant. Ayds is a name which absolutely, positively has to be changed. 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From what I understand, it was the name… and the “AIDS horror” of the mid-eighties that killed it. I can’t imagine how this name got through the approval process. How many customers are actually going to walk into a store and say that? Epimetheus, I got sent home with a nasty letter for bringing Ayds to school in fourth grade. Powered by Discourse, best viewed with JavaScript enabled, Whatever happened to the Ayds diet caramels, http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3304255096&category=2312. Today New Coke is seen as one of the great corporate blunders of all time -- though the brouhaha and re-introduction of the original Coke did spur sales, increasing revenue and helping the company regain its Number One position in the beverage sector from rival PepsiCo. They were ineffective. Originally posted by Duckster I thought that was a pretty dumb stand at the time, since people in the last stages of the disease always seemed to suffer a severe weight loss. prescribed about 25 times as often as Exubera, California Privacy/Information We Collect. According to the company, the main ingredient present in the product can cause the candies to have a reduced desire to eat food. Never lost weight. *Originally posted by Bob Scene * Well, The Onion has only been in existence since 1995 so their parody was actually written long after that date. Join the discussion today. http://w3.uokhsc.edu/phar5442/Lectures/drugtreatmentobesity.html. A lot of stuff I liked as a child or young man is long gone. By 1988, sales had dropped 50% and Ayds changed its name to Diet Ayds in an attempt to recover. Ayds was an appetite suppressant candy with a strikingly unfortunate name. *Originally posted by Vinnie Virginslayer * To add injury to insult, in 2010 the owner of the Segway company, James Heselden, died when the Segway he was riding plunged off a cliff. In 1974 Gerber Baby Products tried branching out to the market of college students and young adults with their "Singles by Gerber" products of meals-in-a-jar. Sometimes a product failure is due to circumstances seemingly beyond the company's control. What's more, some cities started banning them from sidewalks. In 1996 McDonald's tried to go upscale with their Arch Deluxe burger - a more expensive sandwich containing a quarter pound of beef, bacon, lettuce, tomato, cheese, onions, ketchup, and a "secret" sauce, all on a split-top sesame seed bun. If anything, this whole controversy has been incredible publicity for the product. Appearance: Does it matter? They were little candie caramels that came in a few different flavors. Jeffrey Martin Inc., the distributor of Ayds appetite-suppressant candy, has faced just this issue since AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, began getting public attention in mid-1981. **Yeah, but can you imagine working in a store, and having a customer come in and say, “You got Ayds?” Do you really want to answer “Yes!” to that question? Hollywood has had more than its share of bombs, but perhaps none was bomb-ier than Disney's 2012 sci-fi adventure, "John Carter." Retrocrush concurs with the obvious observation that the name simply took on an unmarketable connotation as time went by. It apparently worked by numbing your mouth with benzocaine, and maybe it was just that people didn’t want to try to lose weight anymore that way. What was even worse was the "Mystery Color" ketchup, which meant you had no idea what color condiment would coat your French fries. “Obviously, with a name like Ayds, we’ll have to do some re-marketing,” Berglass said. I added a second "drug" , the diet candy AYDS just to spice the page up a little. They tried doing some damage control… renaming the product “Diet AYDS”, but considering AIDS was already becoming known as “slim disease” in Africa, that wasn’t much help. So it's little surprise that vegetable-flavored Jell-O would receive a similar reception, as when General Foods introduced gelatins in four new flavors: Celery, Seasoned Tomato, Mixed Vegetable, and Italian Salad. We are looking at all aspects of the problem, and that includes the name.”. By the end of the 1980s, … They never did. Dept.) At the end of the day, all you have to lose - is the fat.". from the Original Pet Drink Company of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. - marketed vitamin-fortified bottled water for pets, in such flavors as beef, chicken and fish. Toys, car lines, menu items, soda types, etc. **Now wait a minute. "Heinz 57 Varieties" - the advertising slogan of the ketchup maker - didn't really need any more varieties, especially when they were the Funky Purple, Blastin' Green or Stellar Blue ketchups marketed to kids beginning in 2000. 'And Your Distant Smile' is one option -- get in to view more @ The Web's largest and most authoritative acronyms and abbreviations resource. Does anyone know why it was discontinued? At that point, the Campana Company decided to change the name to Diet Ayds. AYDS. Strangely, that didn’t work either. Hmph. Heublein's Wine & Dine Dinner packaged a small bottle of cooking wine with its easy-to-make Chicken Chablis meal. I can remember when AIDS first burst on the scene and there were all kinds of Ayds jokes (sadly, I don’t remember any of them to provide an example). By the mid-1980s, sales of Ayds had dropped by 50% from their heyday just a few years earlier. 5'2" (158cm) and athletic. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3304255096&category=2312. Even pigs wouldn't eat it. Credit: eBay; Getty Images: Stephen Dunn, Tom Hauck/Allsport, In 2012 Slate Magazine's Farhad Majoo wrote that Microsoft's line of Zune digital media players was "the tech industry's Edsel." The Trade name or brand name is … When Apple launched its Apple Maps app in 2012, replacing an earlier iPhone map application by Google, iPhone consumers may have been forgiven for believing they were using a Beta version. C'est degoutant! With great fanfare Olestra was added to the nutrition labels of snack foods, such as Lay's Light potato chips. "But this was not one of them.". Downyflake's Toaster Eggs were a kind of hockey puck of "egg product" that tried to ride the popularity of Pop Tarts for re-heatable breakfast food. Does anyone know why it was discontinued? The weight loss market has come a long way since the 1970s with the discovery of some verifiably helpful appetite suppressant ingredients. "Why take a diet pill, when you can enjoy AYDS." Here is one: Mazindol is the generic name for a diet drug made by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz. Copyright © 2021 CBS Interactive Inc.All rights reserved. I recall that, very shortly after the AIDS epidemic became well known, the makers of Ayds publicly stated that they would not be changing the product name. Then there was Ayds, a fudgelike candy that was designed to be taken before meals as an appetite suppressant. From The Onion, supposedly written in 1981: New Appetite-Suppressant Candy Takes Diet World By Storm: 'In the ‘80’s, “Ayds” Will Be Synonymous With Fitness And Health,’ Say Makers. In T. Coraghessan Boyle's 1993 novel, "The Road to Wellville," an early-20th century entrepreneur tries to jump on the breakfast cereal bandwagon by developing a cereal derived from celery. Dorm life not being the most conducive to infantalizing food consumption, the products died. Biden administration says no. AYDS - now that's a product in need of a new marketing team. So, as it turned out, nobody went. To be fair to Ayds, they launched back in 1937. *Originally posted by Vinnie Virginslayer * Gender: Female. The brand conundrum that proved Ayds’ downfall It was sheer happenstance that, in 1981, led medical officials at the Centers for Disease Control to give the name AIDS to the then-poorly-understood deadly immune system infection that was quickly spreading in the U.S. and beyond and was already in full-on crisis mode by the time officials … The Ayds package is also being redesigned with a modern flair. Having eschewed the original book's title, "A Princess of Mars" (because it was believed boys wouldn't see a movie with the word "princess" in the title), the filmmakers eliminated the sci-fi hook in the adopted title, "John Carter of Mars," shortening it to just "John Carter." Exubera, launched by Pfizer in 2006, stumbled with consumers and doctors alike when the inhalable form of insulin was found to be no more effective that injectable insulin while being nearly twice as expensive. How embarrassed was Apple by its Maps app? The film opened to poor reviews and dismal business, leading Disney to take a $200 million write-down on its investment, which hadn't been helped by name changes. Based on stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs (the pulp writer who created Tarzan), the company sought to launch a new movie franchise with the adventures of a Civil War veteran transported to the Red Planet, where he battles various alien creatures. Should the rock band Anthrax change it’s name? They were little candie caramels that came in a few different flavors. It was written this week, in fact. I would grab a handful and take em to school, lol. Looking for the definition of AYDS? **, Hey, Vinnie, ever work in a store? (The package shown there isn’t the one I remember, which I believe featured a red-and-white check-pattern. When I was young there was a diet aid call Ayds (I’m unsure of the spelling.) You remember, back when everyone was skeered they were gonna die? An unfortunately named chocolate flavored diet aid that went out of business around 1983. Believe me, you get asked all kinds of questions! Do you think customers are really so dumb that they would stop buying the product because it was called Ayds? I’m guessing that it was just a combination of market forces. I remember eating them as a kid- 3rd grade I believe. Some states want to buy their own vaccines. ... and the product was eventually discontinued. Ayds, the diet candy desperately in search of a new name, may have found a new one--Aydslim. Well, The Onion has only been in existence since 1995 so their parody was actually written long after that date. Amazon.com : Dr Joey's SKINNYCHEWS - Premium dark chocolate candies that help alleviate after dinner cravings and promote appetite control with less than 20 calories per chew. Since the start of the AIDS pandemic, seems like that is the last name anyone with a brain would call a product they were actually hoping to sell. I can remember when AIDS first burst on the scene and there were all kinds of Ayds jokes (sadly, I don’t remember any of them to provide an example). Here, try this: ebay.com search for ‘ayds’ search only completed auctions…youll see a big list of sales for posters for Ayds from 50s! **Oh come on. Pfizer took a reported $2.8 billion write-off on Exubera. First introduced in the 1950s, Ayds grew in popularity for the next 20 years. If anything, this whole controversy has been incredible publicity for the product. 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