advertisement failure

Advertisement Failure: Commercialized Patriotism

National flags can be a common sight in advertisements. Most countries have some national holiday, some kind of independence day when patriotism gets monetized and used for profit. This is the day when the state will put up flags everywhere, organize some fireworks, maybe even a military parade. This is also the day when many private companies jump on the patriotic advertising bandwagon. Flags or flag colors and shapes on the product packaging, flags in window displays, flags in shop isles. We all have seen this. But why is this happening? Do shop owners really have such strong patriotic feelings that they must utilize every opportunity to display a flag somewhere, or is this just commercialized patriotism—a hypocritical lip service that happens, because marketing people hope to earn a bit of extra cash this way?

Advertisement Failure: Be Ashamed not to Buy

Galleria Riga Advertisement

You rarely see advertisements, which give facts, technical specifications, and an explanation why some product is going to be useful for you. Instead, marketing people prefer to make annoying appeals to emotion. Advertisements tend to be made with the assumption that buyers are irrational, impulsive, and their emotions are easy to manipulate. I’m long since used to marketing people underestimating my intelligence. Most of the time their appeals to emotion are just annoying. Occasionally, however, they get outright disgusting. This is one such example—people are told to be ashamed for not buying some crap.

Advertisement Failure: Birds and Bottled Water

Venden Bottled Water Advertisement

I perceive advertisements as interesting for the same reason why also the psyche of serial murderers can be interesting to study. It’s useful to know your enemy, isn’t it? Being familiar with common marketing techniques and tricks has some practical benefits. I’m not naïve, I won’t claim that I’m immune to being influenced by advertisements just because I have read a few books about marketing. Research indicates that also people who are familiar with some marketing trick can still fall prey to it anyway. But, hopefully, being educated about marketing will make me at least a little bit less likely to make foolish financial decisions due to getting manipulated by a masterfully crafted advertisement. So, yes, I do find advertisements interesting, and I study them. Every now and then I spot some really bad advertisements that make me cringe and feel repulsed by the product. Here’s one such bad advertisement that invokes from me the wrong associations.