From just one glance, this advertisement has an obvious issue. The sentence “This Mother’s Day, Get Back To The Job That Really Matters” immediately states a very controversial opinion. This sentence insinuates that a mother’s job is to be the cleaner of the household, which is an incredibly misogynistic view for a company to show. It’s really not the best wording to make people want to buy your product, especially since this advertisement is directed towards women on Mother’s Day. Did Mr. Clean have to share their clear views on women’s places in the household, because that was probably not the best decision considering that in this day and age it is pretty much accepted that women can do equal things to men. It’s clear that the ad designers at Mr. Clean really didn’t think this one through. These words end up causing an opposite effect than the one desired, as offensive wording like this often causes drops in sales rather than increases. This extreme mistake is so painfully obvious that unless you look further, it can be hard to tell that there are any other mistakes, but they certainly exist.
Looking past the writing, basic design issues also become evident. Remove the offensive sentence and it is still a very badly designed ad. The glare on what is supposed to be the window just makes the entire image look confusing and blurry, causing everything other than the words and giant logo to become a jumbled mess of an image. The lines of an image are supposed to all lead to a focal point. That’s one of the first lessons in an art class! Your eyes are supposed to be drawn to one important spot in an image, but this ad has eye-catching things going on in every section, easily overwhelming the viewer and making it hard to grasp the big picture of the ad. A good advertisement does not create confusion in their audience, and this ad has clearly missed that mark.
The size of the logo at the bottom of the ad is another large design problem. The logo takes up nearly a third of the image which leaves very little space to persuade the audience. Maybe they were going with the whole “buy this product solely because it is Mr. Clean brand!” type of persuasion, but it clearly is not working in this case. Brand recognition does not work when the rest of the ad is a complete mess. At least the ad shows a relatively clear picture of the sponge, but, yet again, it is not in proportion to the rest of the image. The largest object in an ad shouldn’t be the brand of the product. An ad should show off exactly why you should buy the product, not just the product itself. In this case, just slapping a large logo onto an otherwise mess of an ad does not help in the slightest when trying to persuade the audience.
Honestly, I do not know what the designers at Mr. Clean were thinking, but the combination of offensive writing, confusing images, and a way too large logo created a truly terrible ad.