35 Advertisements So Clever, They Deserve A Permanent Spot On The Internet

Not every brilliant marketing campaign is an ad. Some brands have realized that just attaching their name to something people are paying attention to can bring recognition and associations. For example, Dove’s “real beauty” campaign wasn’t exactly promoting the company's products, rather, it was simply research on women’s self-perceptions of beauty. 

One of its most famous takeaways was the startling discovery that “only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful.” Given that you probably see more than a dozen beautiful women while strolling around any city center for less than an hour, the study highlighted the havoc unrealistic beauty standards had caused for female mental health. 

So people and media outlets were discussing and sharing a study that tactically included Dove’s branding and logo and linked to their official website. This way, Dove escaped the trap of “ad blindness” by using (important) research as a sort of Trojan horse. In a sense, this sort of marketing is perhaps a best-case scenario, as a company spends its resources to make something useful for all of us. 

There is a sort of arms race going on, as marketers are becoming increasingly aware that more and more of us have learned to tune out most advertisements. Posters and billboards hardly raise an eye and most of us simply do something else when an unskippable video ad plays. Interestingly, even before 2000, researchers had noticed that many people already had “banner blindness.” 

Further studies into the topic have found that a staggering 93% of ads go unviewed even when directly in front of the user. Add in the prevalence of ad blockers and similar technology and one begins to wonder if anyone has actually ever viewed an internet ad. This, unfortunately, is probably the reason so many banner ads are aggressive, loud, and deceitful, as they need every trick in the book to get you to look for more than a second. 

Interestingly, this number will likely be even lower on sites that you frequent. Once you are familiar with a digital “environment,” your eyes simply know where to look and what to ignore. In other words, your brain collaborates with your eyes to make a deeply effective form of ad blocker. Somewhat nice to know that multimillion-dollar campaigns can be disrupted by your brain on autopilot. 

Despite copious research and the ability to see, in real-time, what generates clicks or not, some companies still seem to think it’s acceptable to run terrible, annoying, and ineffective ads. Studies have shown that using specific calls to action, like “click here” or “sign up now” has practically no effect on the user's actions. 

In the same way that a brilliant ad can make a pretty regular company stand out, a terrible ad can tear down its reputation independent of how we feel about its products. There is no shortage of ads so annoying that many of us promise ourselves that we will simply never use these products out of spite. Research shows that annoying or distracting ads actually generate negative emotions in the average user.