🐂 Red Bull: Gives You Wings (And a Lawsuit)

Ad Card of the Day imagines modern brands still on shelves today as they would have advertised in late-20th-century US sports magazines — then holds them up to the light.

This one was "clinically proven." Medically formulated. No side effects.

It came in a small blue-and-silver can, imported from a Thai truck-driver tonic called Krating Daeng, repackaged for Western gym bags with a promise: stimulates metabolism, increases performance, gives you wings.

Zero regulatory backing. Zero peer-reviewed trials. A slogan that a federal court would eventually rule constituted false advertising.

The 2014 class-action settlement cost Red Bull $13 million. A judge found no proven performance benefit behind "Gives You Wings." Meanwhile Denmark and Norway had already banned it outright; cardiac event reports were piling up globally; and the original Thai formula had been stripped down and repositioned specifically to make health claims that would never survive FTC scrutiny today.

Red Bull is still the world's best-selling energy drink. 12.1 billion cans last year.

Card 3 is the gut-punch: Coca-Cola ran as a cocaine brain tonic until 1903. Hadacol — 12% alcohol, claimed to cure arthritis and anemia — was forced off the market in 1951. The playbook for selling an unproven stimulant to an eager public is very, very old.

The can hasn't grown wings yet. The lawyers have.

#AdCardOfTheDay #RedBull #EnergyDrink #VintageAds #FalseAdvertising #AdvertisingHistory #GivesYouWings #CorporateHistory #DesignHistory #DarkHistory

🐂 Red Bull: Gives You Wings (And a Lawsuit)

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