The worst ads of the year, according to marketing publication The Drum, included Apple’s cringy ad showing the iPad literally crushing human creativity, Google showing how AI could help a seven year cheat her way through writing a fan letter to an Olympian, Jaguar’s controversial brand revamp, Bumble’s bumbling ad imploring their female users to hook up more often and several others. I had to agree with the assessments for the various ads/campaigns being terrible, but looking at the list there were two things that stood out for me.
The first was that brands who got the cultural zeitgeist wrong suffered the most. In a time when people were worried about the potentially huge changes that AI will bring to our professional lives and the lives of children growing up with it, making light of that or dismissing the worries about tech killing or replacing human creativity was a losing message. Both Apple and Google paid for it.
Secondly, for both Bumble and Jaguar the backlash was a result of brands with a reputation seemingly willing to throw that goodwill away in service of pivoting in a new unpopular direction. Jaguar potentially alienated their longtime brand fans. And Bumble, long celebrated as the leading dating platform to empower women first, apparently abandoned this focus with their campaign.
The conclusion anyone in marketing can draw from the examples is about the importance of understanding both what your brand stands for and the culture within which you are marketing it. Get those two things wrong, and you will predictably fail.
