This post is part of our Ads Gone Bad series. Share your thoughts and memories of this ad in the comments, and be sure to check out our other posts on marketing gone wrong.

One day long ago I found myself standing in line at the unemployment office behind a man with a t-shirt that featured a version of Da Vinci's famous painting, the Last Supper. However, in place of Jesus, Elvis sat in the center, surrounded, not by apostles, but country and western singers. Our society had been rather tolerant of parodies of this iconic painting, until the Folsom Street Fair went over the line, taking its sponsor, Miller Beer, with it.

The San Francisco fair is the culminating event of "Leather Pride Week," and the poster advertising showed a group in Last Supper pose, garbed (scantily) in leather, including dominatrix, a man in a leather dog mask, and many pec and bountiful bosoms. As you might imagine, the image didn't travel well beyond the SF city limits, and particularly offended the Catholic League, which launched a boycott of Miller Beer.

The League would not be appeased with a simple apology, either; it wanted contrition, for Miller to issue a condemnation of the more unsavory activities associated with the event. Miller moved quickly to remove its name from the poster and the event, and issued a statement, part of which read, "we are aware of other disrespectful activities, objects and groups association with or present at the fair which, like the promotional poster, violate our marketing policies."

We have all seen the posts around the internet that a gasoline boycott on May 15th will help put an end to the surging gasoline prices that the nation is dealing with. Chances are if you spend any time whatsoever on the internet you have seen the rants about the boycott on message boards, a friend's blog, forwarded emails from friends...almost everywhere. But is there any truth to the claim that a one day gasoline boycott will help ease prices at the pumps?

As many of you probably already realize, this probably isn't going to do much to alleviate record high gas prices. Sure, thousands, maybe millions, of people might do their part and avoid stopping into their local Exxon station tomorrow, but how many of these same people will need to fill up tonight to make sure they can "do their part" tomorrow? How many drivers are going to manage to make it through Tuesday without stopping for gas in order to "do their part," only to wake up Wednesday morning and cruise on fumes into the nearest station they can find?

Do you see where I am headed with this? What day you buy your gas isn't the key to making a difference. The key to making a difference would be to stop buying gasoline altogether. Or at least finding a way to significantly cut consumption. Changing the day you buy your gas won't make any difference at all.