Oy vey. I've spotted it in a few Swedish blogs recently, and then to top it all off someone mentioned it at work - the old "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux" myth. It goes a little something like this and can be found on countless funny pages, in silly list emails, and spoken during water cooler chats in offices around the world.

Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux used the following in an American campaign, "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux".

The funny of course being that Swedes are unaware of the double entendre.

Here is the mythical ad poster.

(originally posted in the comments for "both of these ads really suck")

So lets be clear, it was not an American ad, it was a British advertising poster, and the pun was intended. Look, the Electrolux sucks so hard it explains the leaning tower of Pisa.

The ad agency was Cogent Elliot - and this was one of the questions that had everyone stumped in the ad trivia game.
Sorry about the photocopy, but it's all I could get my hands on and many thanks to adlister Michiel who had this in his scrap book. The ad won some sort of UK ad award back in the early nineties, most likely 1991 though I don't know which one. Are there any adgrunts out there armed with a collection of old award books or otherwise clued in to more details about this ad, like names of creative who made it and such? I want to put this ad myth to death already - the nothing sucks like an electrolux ad was real but British. And don't let anyone tell you any different.

Snark Hunting even snarked about it when they read and article in the San Francisco Chronicle that "trot out the same old apocryphal tales of ad campaigns that got lost in translation."

What will it take to kill this myth?