When Ads don't add up

I am a visual person so I really appreciate a good advertising campaign. I define a good campaign as one that ties a strong message to humour or wit. Which brings me to a campaign that, as far as I’m concerned, completely misses the mark. And that would be Centennial College’s four-poster series of advertisements that can be found in subways (and possibly elsewhere).

Each poster features a picture of a teenager doing typical teenage things – scarfing down food, bumming on a couch, making a face with a hanging-out tongue and plugged into an smartphone/mp3 gizmo. The messages on these posters imply that there is great potential to be found in all these individuals, even if on the surface they look very clueless.

I can imagine that it’s getting tougher and tougher to stand out among Ontario’s homogeneous colleges. But I strongly feel that this campaign’s meaning gets lost under the in-your-face images and captions. It is too caricatured for high school grads, and too childish for more mature students like me. All I could do was shake my head at these posters. Yes, I understand that Centennial is trying to emphasize inclusiveness, diversity and different perspectives as one of its values. But there is certainly is subtler and more elegant way of indicating that, is there not?

But perhaps in this crowded marketplace, we have become so desensitized to marketing, and marketing has becoming so manipulative of us, that brazen, attention-seeking advertisements is the only way we can communicate with each other.