Have you ever noticed the radical difference between product marketing campaigns and awareness marketing campaigns? Say the difference between a fast food ad, where every single element of the advert is meticulously chosen to saturate your brain with happy thoughts, while on the other hand an awareness campaign against a drug would leave you with a strong taste of discomfort induced by the dark nature of the advert. For sake of illustration, feel free to look at the two following YouTube videos:

Meth Awareness: Crystal Meth – Not Even Once

Coca-Cola Commercial: Coca-Cola Security Cameras

But why is it so? How did we come to the conclusion that inflicting fear, guilt and uncertainty to an audience would lead to a positive outcome? I believe that in simplified terms, the two types of campaigns are the exact same, just with a negative twist on one of the two. What I mean by this is that a methamphetamine prevention campaign is in essence a sabotaged advertisement for the drug, where the substance is still perceived as a product but where it’s just being criticized instead of being valorized. This approach, I’m sure, makes a fair deal of sense if you consider the awareness commercial out of context.

Consider now if you will, your attention for adverts as a market with two goods, with respectively awareness campaigns and product campaigns. We could in no time see that these products are substitutes for one-another. Now remember that one of these products tried to make you feel happy and good, while the other one tries to do the exact opposite. Rationally, we see that the product campaign is the most appealing.

 Leading us to the point of this post. Awareness campaigns are supposed to be a good thing, that should benefit society as a whole, but because they are “painful” to watch, they actually do a lousy job at fulfilling their objective.