Don't Rub Me Wrong: Why Sticker Advertising Stinks

Sticker advertising is supposed to a cost-effective way to have your brand publicised. You can make stickers with your company logo and key messages and stick these at offices, cars, and other strategic locations. There are normal paper stickers to those made with radium to make them glow at night.

But here is how car stickers can become quite an irritant. A colleague of mine recently went for a meeting and when he came out later to the parking lot, he found a big brand new colorful sticker stuck on his car windscreen glass. It was a sticker of some website company offering its great services.

The trend seems to be catching on. Nowadays wherever you go - a restaurant, workshop, event, fun village, night club - you will most probably find a sticker on your car. There are even sales people standing at traffic signals trying to put some stupid-looking stickers on your vehicle.

I wonder which advertising agency gives such weird ideas to their clients. Companies can have their company logos branded on their cars and personal properties and their employees' as many as they want. But they shouldn't try to make outsiders become their brand ambassadors without knowing whether those outsiders like their brands or not.

Different people can have different taste and a logo which is so treasured by a company can become quite an eye sore to somebody else, if you thrust that logo into other people's personal belongings without their consent.

My car had also recently started to look like a company car on a road show, decked up all sorts of unwanted stickers on the windscreen and rear window glasses. From the moment those stickers were pasted on my car, without my knowledge or approvals of course, I never seem to have liked the companies to which those stickers belong to, leave alone being their advertiser on the road.

Well, my colleague and I drove down few days back to a painter's shop and they removed all the stickers quite efficiently with a paper cutter and then finally rubbed off the remaining shreds with some 'mitti ka tel'. Our cars are quite clean looking now.

A word to these companies and their advertising agencies - most people nowadays skip commercials on TV almost all the time even if there are some great rantings out there by some self-proclaimed gurus about how creative ad campaigns are. The least they can do is not to thrust on people to become their advertising mediums.