Lauren
Creating an effective, blunder-free advertising campaign is often easier said than done, especially when your business doesn’t have a PR or marketing team to help. Even major retailers and companies with practically unlimited resources miss the mark time and again.
However, even though it can be tricky, avoiding advertising mistakes is key to maintaining your brand’s reputation and keeping your audience happy. If you release an ad that is offensive, or tone-deaf, even by accident, it can cause consumers to think negatively about your brand or even boycott your company. At the very least, it will make your brand seem out of touch.
The best ways to avoid making advertising mistakes are to learn from mistakes other brands have made and to double-check your advertisements so that you don’t repeat these blunders.
Advertising mistakes to avoid
Before you launch any advertising campaign, it is crucial to review your ads more than once to check for the following common mistakes:
Cultural insensitivity
In 2021, running an insensitive advertising campaign can draw negative attention and even become an economic death sentence.
Take Nike’s patterned leggings fiasco, for example. When Nike created ads celebrating patterned leggings that resembled Pe’a, the traditional male tattoo of Samoa, they were immediately hit with backlash for depicting this design on women’s leggings. In addition to this criticism, Nike was also admonished for exploiting a tradition that is so sacred and culturally significant.
You can also learn a lesson from Burger King, which had to pull offensive ads depicting people struggling to eat a burger using oversized chopsticks. While the creators of this ad may have seen it as a joke, many people were upset about Burger King making fun of Asian culture.
If you are going to highlight any part of any person’s culture, make sure you do your research and remain respectful to avoid creating an offensive ad.
Insults
Insulting your customers is not the best business practice, yet many brands take this route when creating their advertising campaigns.
Around Mother’s Day, several brands have commercials where it is implied that only moms care about keeping their homes clean. Consider Mr. Clean’s 2011 Mother’s Day ad, for instance, which depicts a mother and daughter cleaning and says, “This Mother’s Day, Get Back to the Job that Really matters.” Ads like these make it seem like a woman’s main duty is to clean.
Likewise, every year around Father’s Day, many businesses launch ads featuring dads who are inept and unable to clean, care for their children, or otherwise manage a household without a woman by their side. These ads are an insult to all of the hardworking fathers who are invested in taking care of their homes and their families.
When you create ads, think about the messages and implications of your ads. This will help you avoid blunders like Dove’s 2017 ad that was pulled for showing a black woman as the “before” photo and a white woman as the “after” photo, implying that lighter skin is cleaner and more beautiful.
For better or worse, all of your ads have a message. Make sure the message doesn’t hurt or offend your audience.
Tone-deafness and ignorance
While it is great for your brand to stay up-to-date and engage with current events and trends, your ads can come across as tone-deaf if you’re not careful.
Consider DiGiorno’s unfortunate Oscar tweet and #WhyIStayed tweet, which were insensitive and tone-deaf toward the Holocaust and domestic abuse in an attempt to capitalize on trending hashtags. Instead of doing research about the origins of the #WhyIStayed hashtag, DiGiorno used this hashtag for an advertisement, causing backlash and making their audience feel like they posted out of ignorance.
Another example is Kendall Jenner’s infamous Pepsi ad, which was pulled for trivializing the Black Lives Matter movement and issues regarding police brutality. This commercial faced immense scrutiny and led many consumers to boycott Pepsi products.
Don’t allow your desire to stay relevant to end up causing you more harm than good with your advertising campaigns. This will help you avoid being like Halara which used a song about a suicide attempt in the background of a dress advertisement on TikTok. If you don’t understand where a social networking trend started or you’re not 100% sure you understand every single term and symbol being used in your ad, do research first.
Preventing advertising mistakes
If you want to avoid being like the companies above, there are a few steps you need to take before you open TikTok, log on to Twitter, or take any other steps toward advertising your products.
Seek out feedback
Test out your ads before they are seen by hundreds or even thousands of people on social networks. Make sure you solicit feedback from people of a variety of different backgrounds so that you don’t miss an important perspective. You will also want to get feedback from people who make up your target demographic.
Is your advertisement about beauty products for women? You might want to get some women to weigh in on your advertisement ideas first. Are you making an ad for Father’s Day? Go through your plan with some dads.
Getting feedback will allow you to correct any mistakes before they are out for the world to see.
Be inclusive
If your ad is for a product everyone of any race, gender, or sexual orientation can enjoy, but you only feature people who look a certain way or belong to one specific group, you are bound to have some backlash.
While some advertisements, like a commercial for men’s deodorant or a men’s sports league, might make sense to only feature a specific group, most can benefit from inclusivity. Think about your target audience. If your aim is to reach people between the ages of 21-29, for example, then you should include people of a variety of genders and racial backgrounds in your advertisements as long as they depict that age group.
Do your research
Before you use a trending hashtag, find out why it is trending. Before you incorporate a symbol into an advertisement, figure out what it means. Before you select a song to use in the background of a video, look up the lyrics.
Doing your research will keep you from making embarrassing mistakes with your ads.
Look up the connotations behind certain symbols, phrases, and imagery so that your “jokes” don’t end up hurting your target audience. See what people are saying about trending events and topics so that you don’t accidentally say something that will offend your audience.
Spend as much time as you can learning the ins and outs of every part of your ad so that you can be confident that you won’t drop the ball.
Double-check everything
When you’re sure everything in your advertisement looks good, check it all again. It is far better to spend extra time ensuring that your advertising campaign will be successful than to risk people boycotting your brand or wasting money when you have to pull an ad.
