That’s the same for most of the countries regardless their religion. In Turkish example, you can see the boom of ads near to end of January. At all the billboards, magazines, TV… Everything comes with too many message to persuade you for consuming as much as you can afford. For consumers, that’s the way of saying iLove u!

You can see the specific Valentine’s Day advertisement of Apple in pink theme. Because pink, red, roses, chocolates, diamonds are the symbols of the love in materialistic perspective.

Innocent cards remained in the past, marketers made us more materialistic to show our passion and emotions. Because they saw the big opportunity in the market, every year billion and billion dollars are spent for only one day!

Even if it is a materialistic thing, as a girl, I cannot not give up my gift actually. The market and environment imposes us for it. If I cannot receive anything special, I would be broken for sure. That is true for most of the women population in the world.

Not only couples, but also singles are affected by Valentine’s Day, because they are consuming for themselves in order not to feel alone. They are buying gifts, chocolates and they are preparing special event with their single friends like girl’s night-out =)

I didn’t mention about historical perspective of Valentine’s Day because it is obvious, it comes from St. Valentine who was a holy priest in Rome. And sending Valentine cards means declaration of love. If you interest in history, you can read more at Wikipedia.

Today we are using Valentine’s Day as an advertising fair and there are many creative works all over the world. I chose two advertisements as you see in my post, one of them was Apple and another one and the more creative one is Heineken, a beer company, I think. It is a print ad from Asia and it was created by Thoainguyen/Bates, Vietnam.

They used the light effect on the bottle to show it as a diamond ring! Even if you could not interprete the ad at the first time you saw, you can remember the specific green color of the bottle and see the connection between the ring and beer.

Social media is also very interactive on those days before Valentine’s Day. There are too many microsites for Valentine’s Day campaigns and you can see some Turkish examples of it below:

Ford: Fiesta in Love
Turkcell: İlişkinin adını koy/Put the name of your relationship
Regal: Söyle Bana Tuzluk/Tell me Saltcellar
Vestel: İlan et aşkını/Declare your love

This list goes on like that and most of them integrate their campaings with Facebook, Twitter and other social bookmarking sites instead of only using a microsite on the web. You can share your score or results via Facebook with a direct link from those microsites.

Beside of the companies, retailers and shopping malls are using the Valentine’s Day as an advertisement opportunity. I saw many of the OOH ads on the billboards at Eskişehir road. They are providing speacial promotion packages that include discounts, gifts, etc.

In short, this is the time of ads to spend and consume for your love. And I fell happy to know that I will exactly receive a gift for that day!