Are we lazy, busy, or just incompetent? Some ads make you scratch your head rather than reach for your wallet, and those head-scratchers are the ads I like to talk about. Fortunately for me, I follow one of my favorite blogs - Good Ad Bad Ad - quite religiously, and one of their newest posts had me completely dumbfounded.
Exhibit A:
Now this is bad. I mean really bad. And I couldn't be happier that Good Ad Bad Ad brought it to my attention.
I have a passionate hate for stock imagery, but I also understand that in some cases it is a necessary evil. Sometimes budget constraints stop you from getting the right picture, or maybe you just don't have the time. However, if you are a company like Southwest Airlines, this mistake just can't happen. The only thing worse than using a stock image in an ad is using a stock image in an ad and making no effort to make it look like your own.
Now Mr. Goldman made a valid point, maybe they didn't pay for the rights. But it should stand to reason that if you didn't pay for the rights and you can't remove the watermark, maybe we just shouldn't use the photo. Take your own. Create a similar image. Do literally anything besides announce to the public, "We copy-pasted this image and we couldn't care less." Whatever happened in the creation of this ad, Mr. Goldman was right when he said that the designer screwed the pooch on this one.
Ads like this help me justify my distaste for the stock photos and they also give us something to talk about. Keep it up advertisers. I love what I'm doing, and without you, there would be no blog.
Exhibit A:
Now this is bad. I mean really bad. And I couldn't be happier that Good Ad Bad Ad brought it to my attention.
I have a passionate hate for stock imagery, but I also understand that in some cases it is a necessary evil. Sometimes budget constraints stop you from getting the right picture, or maybe you just don't have the time. However, if you are a company like Southwest Airlines, this mistake just can't happen. The only thing worse than using a stock image in an ad is using a stock image in an ad and making no effort to make it look like your own.
Now Mr. Goldman made a valid point, maybe they didn't pay for the rights. But it should stand to reason that if you didn't pay for the rights and you can't remove the watermark, maybe we just shouldn't use the photo. Take your own. Create a similar image. Do literally anything besides announce to the public, "We copy-pasted this image and we couldn't care less." Whatever happened in the creation of this ad, Mr. Goldman was right when he said that the designer screwed the pooch on this one.
Ads like this help me justify my distaste for the stock photos and they also give us something to talk about. Keep it up advertisers. I love what I'm doing, and without you, there would be no blog.
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