National Football League

In the Spirit of bad taste ... this ad

Published Nov. 8, 2013 12:00 a.m. ET

foxsports

Stay classy, Spirit Airlines.

The same outfit that used the Manti Te'o girlfriend hoax as part of a promotional campaign is back at it, having fun with the Richie Incognito-Miami Dolphins scandal to try to sell some discount airfare.

Guess bullying is funny when it's happening to a 6-foot-5, 320-pound NFL player. What do you think? Bad taste or just a bad joke?

Maybe not coincidentally, Spirit is the only American airline on Business Insider's list of the 20 worst airlines in the world. It even has spawned several Twitter accounts dedicated to spreading the message that Spirit sucks.

Anyone know why Castaway is so cheap to license for showing on airplanes? Our customers will love this! @FedEx @tomhanks @castawayball
— Spirit Airlines (@SpiritAirPR) October 9, 2013

And yet as bad as Spirit's ad is, it might not be as bad as Home Depot's "College Gameday" tweet this week.

Here's a screenshot of the @HomeDepot tweet... pic.twitter.com/R1GmK5Iwv6
— Jonathan Wall (@imfromraleigh) November 7, 2013

The tweet showed a picture of two African-American drummers with a person in a gorilla mask in between them and asked: "Which drummer is not like the others?"

The tweet, from Home Depot's official Twitter account, @HomeDepot, was part of a "College Gameday" college football promotion on ESPN. It was quickly pulled, but not before people took screen shots of it and it was widely circulated on social media. NBC and CNBC, among others, reported on the tweet.

Home Depot said Friday that it has fired the person and outside agency that was responsible for the tweet, but did not disclose their names.

"We have zero tolerance for anything so stupid and offensive," said Stephen Holmes, spokesman for the Atlanta-based company.

Holmes said the company is "closely" reviewing its social media procedures to determine "how this could have happened, and how to ensure it never happens again."

Allen Adamson, managing director of branding firm Landor Associates, said the tweet is "the worst possible message Home Depot can send out ... even if it gets attributed to stupidity."

"In a Twitter world where everyone can see everything instantly I think you'll see more rather than less of this because people tweet before they think," Adamson said.

Home Depot is not the first company to get in trouble for offensive tweets. In September, AT&T apologized for a Twitter message that commemorated the Sept. 11 attacks because of complaints the company was using the event to promote itself. And KitchenAid faced backlash in 2012 when one of its employees mistakenly posted a tweet about President Barack Obama's grandmother's death on the official KitchenAid Twitter account.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.