20 Ads That Insulted Their Own Audience

Invisible for Black & White was designed to solve a mundane clothing problem: deodorant marks on dark fabric and yellowish staining on white garments. That product context explains why Nivea was thinking about black and white in the first place. It does not explain why a Middle Eastern Facebook ad ended up using the phrase “White is purity” beside a woman dressed in white. Taken outside the narrow context of fabric care, the wording carried a racial meaning that was impossible to ignore.