Jewish advertising and marketing

As far as I’m concerned, commercial advertising should be banished.

Joseph, then shut down every Jewish newspaper and sites like YWN, which make their money via advertising.

I don’t even get that.

Where would it end?

Let’s just be succinct:

No.

There is absolutely no issue with fancier advertisements. And to even suggest it approximates Chukas HaGoy is ignorant at best and facetious at worst.

Content, on the other hand, could be an issue. It is certainly ossur to deliberately mislead or, as become all too common, use inappropriate messages or pictures.

my “issue” with some frum advertising is that it uses torah, mitzvos and rabbonim as props.

ShowJoe:

By innaproppiate, I didn’t mean it necessarily regarding tznius, although any use whatsoever of women’s pictures in advertising is wrong. Simply becasue a woman is tzniusdikly dressed does not make it appropiate. In the vast majority of these cases the use of a women’s picture is completely unecessary, and as such innaproppiate. MOst frum publications, such as the Mishpacha and the Hamodia, rightly have a no women at all policy, be it frum women or the Queen, and I don’t see why this perfectly sensible policy should also apply to advertising. If anything, it is a far more apt rule for a medium where the use of a women’s picture is more likely to be for cosmetic purposes.

So whilst I do believe there is an issue in the depiction of women in frum advertising, this is not the only problem I was referring to when I used the term ‘inappropiate’. I simply could not be bothered to enumerate all the examples I was referring to.

Firstly, the use of, as APushtaYid has pointed out, Rabbonim, seforim or generally divrei kedushah out of context and innapropiately. Also, the themes of adverts are often not in keeping with the frum ethos. An advert should provide no other fuction but to make one’s product look attractive and make people aware of it. Using outlandish claims and obviously misleading statements, as is ubiquitous in the goyshe world, is almost certainly geneivas daas.

Another issue is the commercialisation or trivialisation of devorim kedoshim. This is a separate issue to them being used as props. It, for example, manifests itself in a advert I saw a few years back that had decorated every day of the sefirah with a different bottle of wine, with the caption ‘This is why you’re counting down to Shavous (Don’t worry Mods, the company in question cannot be identified from this, and besides no longer exists). i thought the general attitude that had gone into that advert, even if not overtly wrong, was slightly off, and it bothered me. Many other adverts follow in the same vein.

Certain frum websites use flashing ads that are very annoying (and not very professional — you seldom see them on secular websites). Fortunately, I use an ad blocker so I don’t have to look at them. I also have a problem with a certain tzadaka that has glossy inserts in Jewish papers dozens of times a year. I don’t go to the mountains so I’m not familiar with the billboards referred to by the OP. The only objectionable Jewish themed billboard I can remember was one on Rockaway Turnpike a few years ago for a matchmaking service.