Advertisement: something that is shown or presented to the public to help sell a product or to make an announcement. You can’t walk outside your house without being influenced by some form of advertisement or someone trying to persuade you. It could be the commercial you watched while eating breakfast or the one that played on the radio on your way to work. The picture on the side of a website you were using for research or the one you heard flipping through Pandora are snuck into your day as well. We are all surrounded by persuasion and the art of influence; its become a part of everyday life that we barely register. Remember when you saw that Coke commercial of all these younger people having fun drinking the soda? Then the next time you were in CVS you were compelled to buy the Coke you saw staring at you in the fridge and you couldn’t put your finger on it.
That’s what advertisements do, they evoke emotions that persuade you to do exactly what that thirty-second commercial wants you to do. You bought the Coke because you interpreted the commercial positively, that the Coke would make you younger and more lively. So here lies the question: Can it be taken to0 far? Are there forms of influence that do not positively persuade us? Could the art of persuasion cause anger or annoyance? Can advertisements try to control the mind by evoking emotions with negative associations? Imagine an advertisement that used a major tragedy to try and persuade you in a positive light. It sounds like a great way to build emotion and push the audience in the right direction, but all depending on how the advertisement uses the event. Companies must be able to achieve and communicate positive, real-world consequences in a way that 1) is meaningful for their audiences; and 2) leads their audiences to effect positive social change.
September 11th, 2001: The day the world stopped. Two thousand nine hundred and seventy seven lives were taken on that day and they influenced people all over the world, even if you were on the opposite side of the Earth or hardly connected to the attack, you were influenced. This event has been used to try and send messages to an audience; 9/1l is used as advertisement. A number of companies have chosen to exploit the 9/1l attacks in ads selling everything from newspapers to PSAs to arthritis medications. Thousands of lost lives are used to attempt to drive people towards a desired reaction. Advertisements based on 9/11 cannot be made in a respectable way while promoting a cause or business. The terrorist attacks on the towers used as promotion does not give positive power to the advertisement and instead ruins the intended message.
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Trying to be clever about 9/11 is like walking on thin ice, there’s always a risk. There is a collection of ads using 9/11 as a central theme, no matter how inappropriate. For example, this advertisement is made to persuade its audience to stop smoking cigarettes (Image 1). It depicts two lit cigarettes standing up, to resemble the towers burning. The caption of the image is “Terrorist related deaths since 2001: 11,337. Tobacco related deaths since 2001: 30,000,000.” This can be seen as underrating the attacks on 9/11 and making smoking a larger issue. Although smoking is a major health issue for American’s on a large scale and has taken more lives than the attacks on 9/11, terrorism and the events of 9/11 is still a large scale tragedy and started a war for the United States and this war has taken even more lives due to terrorism. This advertisement has many more interpretations than the advertisers meant to communicate and “sparks extensive controversy” (Business Insider). This advertisement created by ASH is presented in a negative way that hits the hearts of Americans in the wrong spot.
Emotion is used very effectively in this advertisement however it evokes the wrong emotions than ASH intended it to, it brings Out anger and disgust rather than inspiration and motivation. Now take this advertisement created by LEGO (Image 2). A black and white picture of the city of the New York is used. In the picture you can see the smoke rising up from where the Twin Towers used to stand. In the top right hand corner of the picture, you see the only color in the advertisement; the LEGO logo. The logo is followed by the words: “Rebuild it’. Although this advertisement can communicate that things will heal and that the world can move forward, it also communicates that something so horrific can be so easily fixed. The advertisement does not take the tragedy seriously and is used to promote a children’s toy which is completely inappropriate, these two components do not balance. One writer when writing an article about the advertisement said it, “simply does not work run deeper than its obvious lack of taste and sensitivity” (Persuasion and Influence).
The only color being the LEGO logo makes it stand out compared to the terrifying image that the advertisement uses, showing the primary message of the advertisement is not focused on the brutality of 9/11 but rather, to purchase a children’s toy. Although powerful, this LEGO advertisement is not persuasive in the way LEGO may have hoped it to be. It comes off as disrespectful in its suggestion that a terifying incident such as this can be fixed as easily as building another building with LEGO’s. The same writer from the blog, Persuasion and Influence, agrees that the advertisement “detracts attention from its brand to thoughts of September 11th, making the advert entirely unsuccessful.” Although one can see where VLCC was going with this next advertisement, it is completely disrespectful (Image 3). Like the LEGO advertisement, it tries to balance two completely different pieces and again the only color in the picture is the product in the top right hand corner. This advertisement is for Indian Berberry Face Scrub and uses a burning tower from 9/11 to partner its caption “Some scars don’t heal.”
The advertisement is communicating to its audience that American’s may never heal the mental scars from the tragedy, but they sure can heal physical scars with their product. This message, again, takes away from the focus of its main graphic, 9/11, and concentrates more on the promotion of the product. An advertisement like this and the LEGO one can completely destroy a brand’s value and fortune just by misinterpretation of the intended meaning. It uses the power of emotion in the wrong way and patronizes the event of 9/11. When any advertisement attempts to combine two elements that do not match up, it can come across in a disrespectful manner and take away the value and validity in the message. Solidarites created an advertisement for bad quality drinking water and manages to put down two tragedies in one image.
“Non-drinking water kills 8 millions persons a year” it says, or 2,000 times more than died in 9/11 and the sinking of the Titanic combined. It is made apparent that low quality drinking water is a global wide issue rather than an issue that has only affected a certain group of people. A blogger on a blog pertaining to this advertisement believes, “they’re trying to say that we pay a lot more attention to the Titanic and 9/11 than to preventable diseases caused by non-potable water” (AOTW). However, it fails to also point out the severity of the two events that it uses to show the reality of the large numbers. It also goes on a tangent on the caption by telling the audience to go to politicians to fix the issue.
Having too much in one advertisement can cause bad reactions because the audience is given too much to focus on at once. Another comment on the same blog post showed that the blogger thought the advertisements organization was poor and that, the whole thing doesn’t make any sense” (AOTW). It also doesn’t help that one of the focuses is the undermining of two horific events. Advertisements based on 9/11 cannot be made in a respectable way while promoting a cause or business. The terrorist attacks on the towers used as promotion does not give positive power to the advertisement and instead ruins the intended message. Writer Christina Austin agrees, “September 11 is supposed to be a somber day of remembrance for the victims, the heroes, and the families that were impacted by the tragedynot an opportunity to sell something,” (Business Insider).
Although these advertisements can effectively utilize pathos and use emotion to sway the audience, it detinitely pushes them in the wrong way and opposite from what the advertisement intended to persuade. The question for brands regarding aligning themselves with 9/11 commemoration is one of “how” — not “if.” A picture is worth a thousand words, but the power you put in those millions of pixels can destroy the meaning of an entire message. With just pixels, you can disrespect an entire group of people and lose that audience completely. Basing your marketing on corporate responsibility instead of cheap edginess is the best way to reach your target. This joins your brand with your audience in a common cause, the “cheap edginess” alienates them. There are many ways to advertise a business or cause in a fair and reasonable way that still drives emotions however, using tragedy or death, especially the attacks on 9/11 is not a way to do so respectably.
Works Cited
Austin, Christina. “These Are The 10 Worst Ads Exploiting The 9/11 Attacks.” Business Insider.
Business Insider, Inc, 11 Sept. 2012. Web. 16 Oct. 2015.
“Behaviour Change.” Persuasion and Influence: Lego Uses September 1lth as an Advertising
Tool. N.p., 8 Feb. 2013. Web. 16 Oct. 2015.
“Solidarités: Titanic.” AOTW. N.p., Jan. 2008. Web. 16 Oct. 2015.
