We all must agree that we usually link flowers to happy occassions. And as marketers if we ever think about creating an advertising campaign for happy occassion based flowers or a flowershop, we would most certainly be skewed towards relating the campaign to happy occassions like birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, valentines day, etc.
Keeping this notion in mind I came across a few ads that are attached below, that totally changed my perspective of thinking in-side the box. These ads belong to an online French flower store named 123fleurs.com and are promoting flowers as safer gifts. Since flowers do compete indirectly against a lot of other gift items based on a specific share of pocket, 123fleurs.com has used this idea in an extremely amazing manner by depicting tragedy and shock with a tagline “Flowers Would Have Been A Better Idea!” This tagline sums the whole ad up.
The first ad is about an old lady, who died because of a heart attack she got by getting a sudden shock when she opened her gift. The gift in this case is the famous “Jack-In-The-Box,” which is very well known to give shock surprises for fun. As I said earlier that the tagline ”Flowers Would Have Been A Better Idea!” sums up the whole ad and sticks to your mind to be careful in selecting a gift for an old or a sensitive person the next time. And you might as well end up getting flowers 
.
123fleurs.com Heart Attack
Similarly the second ad shows a pilot making a heart for his beloved through an air show, which is indeed about communicating a message on an anniversary, birthday or maybe valentines day, but its very depressing to see … that the planes crash! And then after getting quite sad at the image, we see a message at the bottom mentioning that “Flowers Would Have Been A Better Idea!”
123fleurs.com Planes
Very interesting concept overall. Would love to see more of them. If I find some, I’ll post back. In the mean time, if you wish to access 123fleurs.com, you can access it here.
