Covert Advertising

One of the Civics chapters for my 12 yo daughter is on advertising. After describing the purpose of advertising (to persuade you to do something), it gets into the various types of advertising – commercial (buy something), social (change your behavior), and political (vote for X).


Interestingly, it also has a section on “covert advertisements”. I tried explaining that to my daughter with an example – if Virat Kohli wears Ray Ban glasses when he is out at an event, notice that he is never saying that Ray Ban is the best. But people notice what he is wearing and may decide it is a good set of shades and buy it. That’s covert advertising, I told her.


I was very amused that her teacher had used a similar example too. Back in 2020, Cristiano Ronaldo had famously pushed aside Coca Cola bottles at a press conference as if to say it wasn’t good (either in taste or for health – Ronaldo is a fitness freak). If you haven’t seen it, or don’t remember it, have a look at the video before you read further:


While amusing, I didn’t get how this for covert advertising – it only seemed to be saying something negative about Coca Cola, I thought. But I had missed something, as the teacher pointed out. Since Ronaldo had also held up a bottle of water and called out in Portuguese, “Aqua!”, her teacher said this was probably covert advertising for… bottled water!


Whether or not it was a covert advertisement for bottled water, it almost certainly got the job done – it cited an event that is very famous, involved a celebrity who is loved by kids, all of which made it very likely that most kids will remember it for a long time, if not for life. Well done!

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