Bad advertising is advertising that does not work. Instead of increasing sales, it reduces them, or, if you are lucky, they will remain at the same level. At the same time, history knows enough examples when large international corporations with huge advertising budgets got into unpleasant situations. Why this happens often remains a mystery, because, it would seem, real professionals work in their advertising departments.
In other cases, it happens because marketers launch advertising campaigns without any market research. As a result, the company's stock falls, the target audience turns away from the brand due to the wrong storyline, false execution, unclear context, inappropriate visuals, offensive content, and so on. People who see these ads feel Spanish shame about their very existence and think that it would have been better if they had not seen it.
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Signs of bad and unsuccessful advertising
Now that we have defined what bad advertising is, let's look at what common characteristics all such marketing creations have.
Fortunately, the digital age gives us the opportunity to be twitter data relatively objective when evaluating advertising based on data (falling shares, dislikes, number of views and other indicators) obtained from the global network, and also to exclude situations when advertising gets into our rating only because we specifically did not like it.
Sign Why is this bad?
Inappropriate content Nowadays, you can offend anyone with anything. And access to the Internet and social networks makes it possible to openly express your point of view, create thematic hashtags and find supporters to boycott entire companies and brands. The reasons for such discrediting campaigns include manifestations of racism, sexism in advertising, imposition of gender stereotypes and other violations of social norms.
False information Unfulfilled expectations are one of the most terrible things in marketing . When advertising a product and endowing it with properties, a company must confirm this in real life. If a potential client believes the advertising and then does not receive what was stated, then the brand will have serious problems with almost 100% probability.
Feeling of embarrassment/ disgust/ rejection An advertisement can evoke strong emotions through monstrous design, a "collective farm" visual series or a "cringe" plot. At the same time, a person simply will not understand how such a thing could have occurred to someone, for what target audience this advertisement was created and how it could have been approved for broadcast.
Lack of assessment of geo- and cultural features Very often companies forget a simple fact: what is acceptable in one market may be completely unacceptable in another. For example, coloring a logo in rainbow colors is unlikely to be understood in Eastern countries, and polygamy in Western ones. Ignoring such regional and cultural differences can easily destroy even a large business.
It is not necessary for all of these signs to be present for advertising to be bad or unsuccessful. Sometimes, just one of them is enough to ruin the brand image or simply not reach the target audience .
Examples of unsuccessful advertising
Now let's look at some striking examples of bad advertising that can be found in the most varied and unexpected places, and are created by players from whom you would definitely not expect anything like this, and for which CEOs have to apologize from time to time.
Examples in the media
Today, the media includes not only television, newspapers and radio, but also many social networks like VKontakte or Facebook, websites and channels in Telegram . There is no place where some brand has not launched bad advertising.