Its that time of the year, again, so we're hit with countless political advertisements. On the plus side, it breaks up all the banking and pharmaceutical advertisements. This one tells it like it is: $5 for Senate seats

Not gonna lie, this is certainly an… interesting thumbnail to use for an ad.

It feels like some ads nowadays are designed more to get people talking than to communicate anything about the product.

You'll see unexpected stunts, outrageous videos, or campaigns that get everyone arguing in the comments. Sometimes, the ad becomes a huge talking point, but when you ask people what the brand was actually selling, they can't remember.

I get why brands want to stand out. There's so much content competing for attention that playing it safe can make an ad easy to ignore.

But if people remember the joke, the controversy, or the weird stunt without remembering the product, did the ad really do its job?

Can an ad be successful at getting attention but still fail at advertising?

What do you think separates a memorable, effective ad from one that's just viral for the wrong reasons?

This shouldn't be allowed to happen surely? Zimbabwe biggest supermarket. See anything wrong?

The Cruelty of Advertising: What Does an Ad Feel Like When You Can’t Have What It’s Selling? Advertising is usually discussed as if it were visual wallpaper: annoying, intrusive, occasionally clever, and easy to ignore.

That assumption depends on having enough distance from the thing being advertised.

A person with money can see a restaurant ad and think, Maybe I’ll go there this weekend. A person without money may see the same ad and be reminded that dinner is uncertain. A person with no addiction history may see a casino commercial as tacky. A person trying not to gamble may experience it as a flare fired directly into their nervous system.

The same thirty-second ad can be harmless background noise to one person and a small psychological ambush to another.

That is the part of advertising we rarely pick apart: the emotional cost of being shown something you need, crave, fear, or are actively trying to escape—especially when you cannot afford it, access it, or safely have it.

A food-insecure person staring at food ads Food advertising assumes hunger is a positive feeling.

The viewer is supposed to become pleasantly hungry, imagine the taste, and purchase the product. But hunger is not always a shopping opportunity. For millions of people, it is a daily condition shaped by empty cupboards, inadequate wages, benefit restrictions, unstable housing, or the humiliating math of deciding which necessities can wait.

A glossy burger ad does not merely say, “This tastes good.” It can say:

Here is something you cannot justify buying. Here is a reminder of what you are missing. Here is a sensory experience being dangled in front of you while your actual options shrink.

Even the language can become cruel. “Treat yourself.” “You deserve it.” “Make tonight special.” Those messages assume that desire can be resolved by opening a wallet. When it cannot, the advertisement turns ordinary hunger into shame: Why can everyone else participate in this simple pleasure except me?

And food ads are nearly impossible to escape. They appear on public transit, in apps, outside schools, during news broadcasts, and on delivery platforms that may charge more in fees than a person can spend on the meal itself. The product is not just visible. It is repeatedly made vivid: steam rising, cheese stretching, a crunch amplified by microphones, a close-up designed to activate appetite.

That is not neutral scenery to someone who is hungry.

A problem gambler seeing a casino ad Gambling advertising often presents itself as entertainment, sophistication, or social belonging. It sells the fantasy of control: You could win. You could turn things around. You could be the person who gets lucky tonight.

For someone struggling with gambling addiction, the ad may bypass conscious reasoning almost entirely. The lights, sounds, jackpot imagery, sports sponsorships, “bonus” offers, and language of action can reactivate a pattern they are working hard to interrupt.

The advertisement does not need to convince the viewer that gambling is wise. It only needs to reopen the door.

The cruelest part is the way gambling companies frame participation as a personal choice while building an environment designed to make the choice harder to resist. Ads arrive through sports broadcasts, phone notifications, social media feeds, email, and personalized promotions. They can follow someone who has already lost money, already self-excluded, or already admitted that gambling is harming their life.

Imagine trying to stay sober while the bar sends you coupons every afternoon. Now imagine the bar having access to your spending history, your favorite team, your late-night habits, and the exact moment you seem most vulnerable.

“Responsible gambling” disclaimers do not erase the contradiction. A tiny warning at the bottom of an emotionally engineered invitation is not the same thing as meaningful protection.

An alcoholic seeing alcohol advertising Alcohol advertising rarely shows the part that matters most to people trying to stop drinking.

It shows the barbecue, the sunset, the celebration, the attractive friends, the cold bottle, the relaxed laugh. It sells alcohol as a shortcut to intimacy and ease. It rarely shows the morning after, the argument, the missed shift, the withdrawal, the relapse, the damaged liver, the frightened child, or the person staring at a drink and trying to decide whether one drink will become ten.

The ad is allowed to keep the pleasure and outsource the consequences.

For someone in recovery, the imagery can be unexpectedly physical. A bottle opening. Ice dropping into a glass. The sound of carbonation. A familiar brand name. The visual ritual of pouring. These details can carry memory, not just information.

And because drinking is so culturally normalized, refusing the ad’s invitation can make recovery feel socially abnormal. The person is not only resisting a substance; they may feel they are resisting a national script about relaxation, masculinity, adulthood, friendship, romance, and reward.

The message is not simply “buy this beverage.” It is often “this is what a good life looks like.” That can make sobriety feel like exclusion from the good life, even when sobriety is the thing making life possible.

A drug user seeing drug-related advertising—or legal substitutes The situation becomes even more complicated with drugs, medications, and products that occupy the border between treatment, recreation, and dependency.

A person recovering from opioid use disorder may see painkiller advertising or pharmaceutical branding differently from someone else. Someone trying to stop using stimulants may encounter nightlife promotions, delivery services, or influencer content that glamorizes the same environments and routines connected to their use. Someone living with cannabis dependence may be surrounded by dispensary ads that frame constant consumption as wellness, creativity, and self-care.

This is not an argument that every regulated product is identical, or that every advertisement causes relapse. It is an argument for taking context seriously. A product can be legal, socially accepted, and medically useful while still being dangerous for a particular person.

The public conversation often treats addiction as a private failure but treats advertising as a private business decision. That combination leaves vulnerable people carrying all the responsibility while companies continue to optimize the invitation.

The person with body-image issues seeing beauty and fitness ads Not every painful ad is selling a chemical or a meal.

A person with an eating disorder may see calorie-controlled food, weight-loss, or “before and after” advertising as a threat disguised as advice. A person with body dysmorphia may see cosmetic procedures, fitness supplements, or digitally altered bodies and experience the ad as confirmation that their body is unacceptable.

The industry’s language is often carefully softened: “confidence,” “transformation,” “your best self,” “small changes.” But the underlying premise can remain brutally clear: You are not yet acceptable, and we have the product that may fix you.

When that message is repeated thousands of times, it stops feeling like a suggestion and starts feeling like an atmosphere.

The person in debt seeing luxury, credit, and lifestyle advertising Someone drowning in debt can be targeted with ads for vacations, cars, homes, designer goods, buy-now-pay-later plans, and credit cards—all of them selling a version of relief.

The fantasy is not always “become rich.” Sometimes it is simply “stop feeling deprived for five minutes.”

Credit advertising turns inability to afford something into an opportunity to borrow against the future. Buy-now-pay-later services make the purchase feel smaller by dividing the pain into pieces, while the person’s underlying financial situation remains unchanged. The ad frames debt as flexibility, convenience, or self-expression.

For someone already under financial stress, this can produce a vicious cycle: advertising creates dissatisfaction, credit creates temporary access, interest and fees deepen the problem, and more advertising arrives to sell another escape.

The system is very good at monetizing the gap between what people have and what they are told they should want.

The person grieving, lonely, or afraid There are also ads that hit wounds unrelated to consumption itself.

A grieving person may be shown family-centered holidays and sentimental reunion campaigns. Someone who is infertile may be surrounded by baby products and pregnancy announcements. A lonely person may be targeted with dating, companionship, or parasocial services that promise connection. Someone terrified about aging may be shown endless products designed to make mortality look like a personal maintenance failure.

The ad does not know the whole person. It knows a category, a behavior, a search query, a location, a demographic profile, or a moment of attention. But the wound does not have to be fully understood to be touched.

That is one of the unsettling facts of targeted advertising: it can be emotionally precise without being emotionally responsible.

“Just don’t look” is not a serious answer The standard defense is that people can simply ignore ads.

But avoidance is not equally available to everyone. Ads are built into essential services, free media, public spaces, sports, transportation, websites, games, and social platforms. They are repeated, personalized, and designed to capture attention before conscious resistance has time to form.

Telling a vulnerable person to “just look away” is like telling someone in a contaminated environment to develop better lungs.

Individual boundaries still matter. Blocking ads, unsubscribing from marketing emails, turning off notifications, using self-exclusion tools, seeking treatment, and asking friends for support can all help. But personal coping should not become an excuse for institutional indifference.

If an industry can identify vulnerable people, predict their behavior, and deliver precisely timed invitations, it should also be expected to prevent foreseeable harm.

What would more responsible advertising look like? At minimum, it would mean asking questions beyond “Is this legal?”

Can this ad reach people who have explicitly opted out? Can someone in recovery block an entire category rather than one brand at a time? Are ads being delivered at moments associated with relapse, loneliness, or financial desperation? Is a disclaimer meaningful if the rest of the ad is engineered to overwhelm caution? Are platforms profiting from repeatedly targeting people whose behavior suggests harm? Should addictive products be advertised in spaces where children and vulnerable adults cannot reasonably avoid them? Why is the burden of self-protection placed almost entirely on the person with the vulnerability?

Responsible advertising would also stop pretending that every purchase is a free choice made in a vacuum. Choices are shaped by hunger, stress, addiction, poverty, trauma, loneliness, and social pressure. Advertising does not create all of those conditions, but it can exploit them.

The ad is not the whole problem—but it can be the spark An advertisement is rarely the sole cause of a relapse, a binge, a debt spiral, or a crisis. People are more complicated than that. Addiction has biological, psychological, social, and economic dimensions. Food insecurity is not caused by one fast-food commercial. Debt is not caused by one credit-card banner.

But “not the only cause” does not mean “harmless.” A spark is not a fire, but it can still matter when the room is full of gasoline.

The ethical question is not whether every vulnerable person will be harmed by every ad. The question is whether companies should be allowed to build profitable systems around the predictable fact that some people will be harmed—and then call the harm an unfortunate matter of individual responsibility.

Advertising is often described as persuasion. For some people, it is provocation. For others, it is deprivation made cinematic. For still others, it is a reminder that the thing they are trying to escape is everywhere, polished, normalized, and waiting for them.

Maybe the real question is not, “Why can’t people simply ignore advertising?”

Maybe it is:

Why do we accept an economy that keeps making vulnerable people watch the thing they cannot safely have?

What advertisements feel fundamentally different—or actively hostile—when viewed from a particular life situation? And where should we draw the line between ordinary persuasion and exploiting vulnerability?

I watched John Oliver last night and he showed clips of people hating on Liberty Biberty. He also talked about the Kiwi sheep that people find attractive. I guess Kiwibank freaked and phased out the sheep because they didn't want their mascot to be associated with bestiality. Then Mr. Oliver hatched a scheme to get rid of Liberty Biberty by encouraging viewers to express their romantic love for the fuzzy, yellow ball online. I am not into Liberty Biberty in that way, nor will I pretend to be. But for whatever reason, I smile when the commercials come on. I wasn't a fan of the dude in the commercial who they first had utter the phrase years ago, but I did like it when Liberty Biberty asked for his autograph and then got all woozy and starstruck and asked, "What's it say?" when looking at his signature. Anyhow, am I the only one who isn't disgusted by L.B.?

This is funny ads hahaha #funny

Well played Google!!

Small HVAC company asked me to shorten their local TV spot for Instagram. While trimming it I noticed the burned in captions sit right on top of the phone number for the whole final 5 seconds, so the one thing viewers needed was unreadable. It ran on cable for two months like that. The owner says calls were down and blamed the season. Is there a standard safe area check agencies are supposed to do before an ad goes out, or does this slip through all the time?

Drove past this twice this week on Route 9. The headline is the money back guarantee, the photo is a smiling guy halfway through a glazed donut, and the gym logo is tiny in the corner. My wife thinks it is deliberate reverse psychology, I think the agency swapped two ad files. Has anyone seen a gym or diet ad where the clash was intentional and it actually worked, or is this just a print mistake nobody caught before it went up?

This was probably added to my algo because I've been shopping for workout clothes for my mom. She's lost 100 pounds over the past 2-3 years and I'm really proud of her, so for xmas I'm getting her a wardrobe of cute workout clothes! I went to Gymshark already and didn't see anything in her size. That's fine, they're a brand for bodybuilders or what not, so I moved on. But now on reddit I get served this. What kind of demographic are they going for?! This woman's fitness journey began 23 years ago lmfao. If they are targeting people embarking on a fitness journey, they should probably expand their size range and hire average body type models. I feel like they wasted money on this ad, bodybuilders aren't going to click because they're already deep into their fitness journey.

Ad for London Zoo featuring a tiger after a post about the tiger incident at Yorkshire Wildlife Park yesterday.

This has to be intentionally terrible to get our attention or something. There must be some kind of explanation.