Directions: Select the most appropriate fillers for the blanks such that the sentence makes coherent sense.

Comparative advertising can sometimes ___________ very badly and instead of gaining more _________ the company promoting such practices may actually lose them.

Advertising is used to promote a product and going by the flow of first part of sentence, first blank should be filled by a word, which denotes negative publicity for the product. Both options (1) & (2) are pay and backfire are valid. Now using these two options check whether second blank is suitably filled or not from option (1). The sentence goes like 'instead of gaining more publicity', it doesn't sound too good to be deemed correct as you can't lose publicity whereas from option (2) the sentence goes like 'instead of gaining more customers', it sounds convincing. Hence, (2) is the answer.