You gotta admit … you probably needed something like Head On to relieve the headache you got, once you saw this Head On ad.
Some marketing people apparently believe that causing the audience a pain in the skull is a smart way to attract new customers.
If you never saw this ad before, and you are wondering why you suddenly have a headache … data shows, it’s not the ice bucket challenge that you deftly avoided doing last week, when it was still cool.
Here’s an ad that went viral, and despite its “cute” and “warm and fuzzy” emotional message … that moms are great heroines of society, it is actually a horrible ad.
If you’ve seen the ad, you’re probably wondering “Why is this so horrible?”
Well, the answer is quite simple. There were a good half dozen or so real job seekers, spending time, preparing, anxiously trying their best to impress what they believed was a real interviewer for a real position at a real company. The only problem is, the job was fake, the interviewer was not hiring anyone, and the entire process was faked for the purpose of producing an ad to promote greeting card sales for Mother’s Day.
Now, while we should all love and appreciate our moms … after all, we would not be alive without them, we should also not waste the time of real people who are nervously searching for a job.
As anyone who has ever hunted for a job knows, it is nerve-wracking. It is a grueling process. Job hunting is in itself a full-time, unpaid job.
The ad executives who conceived and produced this ad probably thought they were doing a great service to mothers and their children everywhere, in addition to doing whatever they could to push your emotional buttons, in order to sell more dead trees with ink on them, to show moms that they are loved by their children.
What the advertising execs obviously did not think about, was how lame and horrible it is to steal and kill people’s time, which they can never get back, while making them endure yet another horrible job interview, and may have even caused them to miss the one job interview that would have given them a better quality of life.
Nice going, American Greetings’ ad agency. You guys suck.
There are so many better ways to promote Mother’s Day than by stealing the time of people who can hardly sleep at night because they are worried about their next paycheck or other issues related to finding gainful employment. And yet, you chose this way to do it, lying to people, getting their hopes up, and then crushing them, all in the hopes of just squeezing some more money out of the wallets of your customers. For that, you get this dishonorable mention here in the top trusted media watchdog media that puts the unflattering spotlight on Horrible Advertising.
Horrible Advertising 