How Advertising Can Be Bad 

Advertising is supposed to sell promises they keep. It’s meant to create delight, not dread.

But in 2016, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign showed the world how advertising can go spectacularly wrong—by weaponizing fear, bending truth, and overselling fantasies with no intention of delivering.

Trump didn’t run a conventional campaign. He ran a product launch. Himself. “Make America Great Again” was the brand, and every tweet, rally, and TV ad was a hyper-targeted sales pitch.

But this wasn’t about a product that would improve lives—it was about stirring emotions to win votes, using the most potent tools in advertising’s arsenal: repetition, fear, spectacle, and the illusion of certainty.

At the core of his campaign was a bleak narrative: America was broken. Immigrants were flooding in. Jobs were gone. Terrorists were lurking. He sold the crisis, then sold himself as the saviour.

Every ad, every slogan, played like an infomercial for a political messiah. The problem? Much of it was factually loose, emotionally manipulative, and ultimately unfulfilled.

Tariffs triggered trade wars that hurt American farmers and raised consumer prices. And his healthcare plan never arrived. PolitiFact tracked hundreds of his pledges—more than half were broken.

In the business world, that would be false advertising. In politics, it’s called winning.

His campaign and affiliated groups pumped out billions worth of political ads across TV, YouTube, and especially Facebook—where micro-targeting allowed his team to push tailored messages to anxious voters, often exploiting data from Cambridge Analytica.

The platform was flooded with fear: of Muslims, immigrants, Democrats, and decline. Academic studies later confirmed the campaign ran an unusually high volume of negative, emotionally charged ads—more than any candidate in modern history.

This wasn’t just unethical. It was corrosive. Advertising, when done right, builds trust. It connects people to ideas, products, or causes with authenticity and creativity.

But when it’s used to manipulate, deceive, and divide, it damages not only democracy—but the very credibility of the advertising industry itself.

The tragedy is that Trump didn’t invent this playbook. He perfected it. He understood the power of branding better than most politicians. But instead of using that power to unite or inspire, he used it to sell a nation back to itself through fear and fantasy.

And that’s the cautionary tale: when advertising stops being about truth, it becomes propaganda. When it trades delight for division, it stops serving the public—and starts serving only power.

Trump’s campaign was the ultimate case of clickbait politics: the ad got the clicks, the pitch closed the sale—America bought it. But what they got wasn’t what was promised. That’s not just bad politics. That’s bad advertising.