From time to time you may find stupid or even offensive advertisements around media. Do you think those marketers are really that dumb? or are their advertising agencies not performing?

The answer can be both yes and no. It’s so true that some marketers or ad agencies are pushing ideas they think interesting and appealing – but in reality audience don’t think alike.

In other cases, however, dumb advertisements are intentionally made mainly for the following reasons:

• Creates the highest awareness in the shortest media flight and the lowest media cost possible
• Arouses talk-of-the-town effect which helps establish high level of brand awareness out of media advertising itself
• Brain washing – there’s an terrifying idiom that lie can be turned into truth by telling it a hundred times. While adopted in advertising it usually results in commercials with unreasonably high frequency of repeated scripts, slogans or vignettes.
• The advertising is precisely crafted and tested such that it will be hated by 95% of population but highly effectiveness towards the remaining 5%, which are actually, in desired case, its core target audience.

The above are not wrong strategies for sure, but in countless situations those dumb advertisements are turned out to be, as the name implies, dumb advertisements after all. Key point has it that audience remember the ads doesn’t necessary mean they love the ads, let alone turning affinity into purchase behavior.