Public health campaigns are just like regular advertisements, except that instead of selling McRibs, they're promoting awareness for a cause. Sometimes they're done with facts, sometimes they're done with heartfelt testimonials, and sometimes they're done with mind-ripping nightmare imagery that destroys any lingering belief in a loving god.

8 "Where's Your Child?"

Webubanist via Lifesaving Victoria

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Australia's "Where's Your Child?" campaign (designed to emphasize the importance of keeping an eye on kids while they're playing around the beach, swimming pools and other popular drowning locations) featured a hard-hitting poster demanding that parents answer the titular question. Which is actually kind of easy. ("Duh, he's right there.")

To be clear, that image above isn't the ad -- it's a picture of the ad, which is placed at the bottom of an actual swimming pool. The posters were designed by the thoughtful folks in Watch Around Water's Department of Terrible Ideas, presumably to give lifeguards a heart attack every 17 seconds and allow water-winged toddlers to delight in the experience of wading across a decal of the sunken corpse of a young couple's hopes and dreams.

Getty

"Wait, we only had one ad down there? Crap."

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Hundreds of life-size photographs of a drowned little boy were subsequently put in swimming pools across the country, which is kind of like painting Osama bin Laden's silhouette on the back of that curtain that separates first class from coach, or tying a bag of fingers to the underside of new lawnmowers.