Ad Campaigns Using Obama's Figures

Barrack Husein Obama II is the 44th President of the United States of America and the first African American that elected as an USA President. Barrack Obama's popularity is spreading around the world. Let's take a look at Obama's presence in Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/barackobama), wow there are more than 6 millions supporters of him there. In the past, most people across the world preferred Democrat Barack Obama to win the US presidential election over John McCain based on poll spanning 22 countries. Obama's popularity is considered also as a power for USA to convince its alliances and its close-friend countries around the world to find ways to fix the economic crisis and to get closer to muslim countries. Obama's popularity seems too tempting for marketers around the world. Some marketers are creating Ad campaigns that expose Obama look alike figures. Russian advertising agency Voskhod launched ad campaigns for an ice cream product. That campaigns expose Obama look alike figure, with slogan: "Everyone talking about it: dark inside white!". I think that campaigns are little bit racist.

There are also other ad campaigns that use Obama figure, such as a television commercial for heartburn medication in the Philippines, and Sunco, Telkomsel Simpati Card, and Waffle Tango TV ads in Indonesia (the actor is Ilham Anas, Obama look alike from Indonesia - http://hubpages.com/hub/obama-look-a-like). Those ad agencies that create these ads take benefits from Obama's popularity and hope that the products will be remembered and get popular. I think these ads will increase brand awareness (recall) in the mind of customers, but not in the heart of customers because these ads are exposing thing that:
1. not directly related with the quality of the product so that the customers don't know exactly what are those products' qualities
2. not giving promises to satisfy customers' needs or wants
3. not emotionally related with the products nor the customers.
Iam not judging those ads as useless ads, because at a point those ads really can increase brand recall of the product in the mind of customers, but corporations that sell those products must aware that Obama's popularity may go down in the future and those products cannot always rely on the popularity of Obama because there are no make sense associations between Obama and those products and because of that the image of Obama may hurt those brands' images. Corporations must ask ad agencies to launch more heart and unconscious-mind touching ads for their products because:
1. Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions—but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.
2. A lot of customers decide to buy products based on an emotional decision (in the other word buying decision process in many cases is affected by unconscious mind, for example women will be tempted by the shine of a beautiful diamond or gold jewellery and suddenly women wants to have it, women tend to buy lot of stuffs automatically when they see discounts at shopping malls even though they dont need those stuffs, men want to have strong, robust, and branded watches, cars, etc. automatically when they are exposed to those stuffs even their rational minds said that they dont have enough money for those stuffs).

This is another example of commercial advertisements that expose Obama figure. This is television commercial for heartburn medication in the Philippines: