Skip to main content
Some links on this page are Amazon affiliate links. We may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.

Mormon Advertising is Getting Worse

 





When most people think about Mormon missionary work, they picture young men in white shirts and ties, or young women with missionary name tags. That image exists for a reason. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints operates the largest missionary program in the world.

But missionaries are only one part of the church's outreach. For decades, the church has also invested heavily in television, radio, and internet advertising, developing a style that has evolved dramatically over time.


During the 1980s and 1990s, many LDS television commercials felt more like public service announcements than traditional advertisements.

Rather than directly asking viewers to join the church, these commercials usually told short stories. Children often found themselves in situations where they had to choose between honesty and dishonesty or learn lessons about kindness, responsibility, and family relationships.

Because family is such a central part of LDS theology, many advertisements emphasized strengthening marriages, improving communication, and building closer families. The church presented itself as a source of wholesome values rather than leading with doctrine.

The church later shifted toward a more direct branding strategy with its multi-million dollar I'm a Mormon campaign.

These advertisements featured ordinary members from diverse backgrounds introducing themselves with the phrase, "I'm a Mormon," while explaining their lives and beliefs. The campaign embraced the nickname "Mormon" and attempted to reshape public perceptions of the religion.

That strategy came to an abrupt end after church leadership began teaching that using the nickname "Mormon" was inappropriate. President Russell M. Nelson later described promoting the nickname as "a major victory for Satan," making a return to the campaign effectively impossible.

While the church still produces family-centered and service-oriented advertisements today, social media has changed the way those messages are delivered.

Online advertising competes for attention within seconds. Videos must quickly capture interest, keep viewers engaged, and ultimately encourage them to meet with missionaries.

This has resulted in shorter, faster-paced advertisements designed specifically for platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.

One recent trend has drawn attention from viewers online.

Advertisements featuring male missionaries often cover a wider variety of topics, begin more gradually, and generally keep the speaker farther from the camera.

Many advertisements featuring female missionaries follow a noticeably different pattern. They frequently place a conventionally attractive sister missionary close to the camera, and many begin with some variation of the question:

"Do you want to go to church but don't want to go alone?"

This style has generated comparisons across social media to advertising techniques commonly associated with adult websites, where an attractive person immediately addresses the viewer in an attempt to capture attention (with a strong emphasis on fixing a certain evel of loneliness)

That comparison does not necessarily prove the church intentionally modeled its advertising after those techniques.

It's entirely possible these advertisements reflect data about which styles perform best with the audiences seeing them, rather than a deliberate attempt to imitate another industry. Advertising platforms constantly optimize campaigns based on viewer engagement, and the church may simply be investing in formats that generate better results.

Even so, these advertisements represent a clear shift from the slower, story-driven commercials of the 1980s and 1990s.

Whether driven by marketing research, audience behavior, or intentional creative decisions, Mormon advertising today looks very different from the family-centered public service announcements that once defined the church's public image.
Category:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mormon Blood and the Esther Cohen-Tizer-Epstein Letter

With the recent release of nearly 3.5 million pages of the Epstein files, there have been several connections made regarding Jeffery Epstein paying tuition for several students at BYU. The most notable of which is presented in what is known as the Esther Cohen-Tizer-Epstien Letter.    Some are questioning the authenticity of the letter, but some clues seem to point us to a woman named   Esther Cohen .  Lets look at a few connections. Note that these connections are not an attempt at making any accusations and are simply connections made through publicly available information. I will be updating this page as I find more information. EFTA00129111  Reference to the Seven Bowls School of Nutrition From Esther's website: alchemyofnourishment.com (Update March 04, 2026: The site seems to have been taken down) She began studying nutrition as a teenager: Which also seems to align with her site. Alchemy of Nourishment Along with the claim of residing in Colorado Alc...
3 comments
Read

Visualization of the LDS Canon

Around the 1230s, Hugh of Saint-Cher and a team of Dominican scholars produced the first Bible concordance, working through the Latin Vulgate and recording where its words appeared. Because modern verse numbers did not yet exist, the compilers divided chapters into smaller lettered sections so readers could locate an occurrence. Printing made the method far more useful. John Marbeck published the first complete concordance to the English Bible in 1550 . Alexander Cruden's Complete Concordance followed in 1737 and became one of the best-known English Bible reference works. The basic structure remained familiar for centuries: choose a word, then receive a list of passages where it occurs. Latter-day Saints soon adopted the same approach for their own scriptures. In 1900, George Reynolds published A Complete Concordance to the Book of Mormon in Salt Lake City. The 852-page volume was the product of roughly twenty years of work and classified the words of the Book of Mormon so reade...
Post a Comment
Read

Candon Dahle to Marry After Child Abuse Conviction

Former BYU baseball player Candon Dahle is expected to marry this week, less than a year after receiving a plea deal that allowed him to avoid sex offender registration despite admitting guilt to two felony counts involving the abuse of a child. News of the wedding has reignited criticism online, where many argue Dahle's return to ordinary life has come far too quickly in light of the allegations against him.  The topic was recently discussed on Instagram by  @justinthenickofcrime View this post on Instagram A post shared by Justin (@justinthenickofcrime) Dahle first made headlines in February 2025 when he was charged in Fremont County, Idaho, with felony lewd conduct with a child under the age of 16. According to the probable cause affidavit summarized by East Idaho News , prosecutors alleged Dahle sexually abused an 11-year-old girl and covered her mouth during one of the assaults. Authorities also filed a separate juvenile case in neighboring Bing...
1 comment
Read

The "Mormon" Trademark is About to Expire

 The request for Mormon Stories to rebrand has spread quickly through Mormon spaces. Followers learned that om November 14th 2025, the LDS Church had reached out with claims that the podcast was infringing on the “Mormon” trademark. The demand leaned on the legal idea that the Church owns the word.  The request was shared on social media by @mormstories, but those posts seem to have been removed. Fortunately, copies of the email were  shared on reddit. But there is a significant detail sitting behind this entire dispute. The Church will have to renew the "Mormon" trademark in the 2026 to 2027 window.  Source: USPTO database When that time comes, they must prove that they still use the word “Mormon” in active commerce. USPTO rules are clear on this point. A trademark only survives if the owner can show that it is still printed on actual goods or services that are still being sold or distributed. The official guidelines spell it out at uspto.gov under “ Keeping your r...
3 comments
Read

Mormonism's Complicated History With Caffeine

Ask whether Latter-day Saints can drink caffeine and the current answer is yes. The Church’s own historical summary says caffeine has been “left to the judgment of individual Saints” and is not prohibited as a condition for receiving a temple recommend. [3] That answer is clearer today than it was for much of the twentieth century. Church leaders and publications repeatedly discussed caffeine as a drug, a poison, a potentially habit-forming substance, and at times as the apparent reason coffee and tea were objectionable. Some leaders extended that reasoning directly to cola drinks. In 1965, the First Presidency even told a bishop that decaffeinated coffee did not violate the Word of Wisdom and should not disqualify an otherwise worthy member from a temple recommend.[5] The result was a long period in which formal policy, medical explanation, and everyday Mormon culture did not always point in exactly the same direction. That history helps explain why older and younger Latter-day Saints...
Post a Comment
Read

Mormonism and the Satanic Ritual Abuse Scare of the 1980s

       All right. So, for this post today, I’m going to be talking about a pretty sensitive subject. And that’s going to be satanic ritual abuse and potential ties to leadership of the Mormon church.      It should go without saying that this is going to be a little bit more of a sensitive subject. I’ll say up front that I have no intention of diving into specific examples—detailed descriptions of what satanic ritual abuse looks like—outside of broad definitions. My goal is just to give an idea of what makes ritual abuse a little bit different than regular abuse (for lack of a better word). Consider this your heads up that this is going to be a sensitive subject.      I typically wouldn’t really give this type of subject very much attention. I certainly never planned on making a post about it. But I did have an interesting conversation the other day with an LDS content creator that I message with sometimes. I was a little surprised whe...
Post a Comment
Read

The Church is Changing the Sunday Schedule... Again

On September 6, 2026, Latter-day Saints will arrive at church to find the second hour rearranged. Sacrament meeting will remain no longer than 60 minutes. Adults and youth will then attend 25 minutes of Sunday School every week, followed by 25 minutes of Relief Society, elders quorum, Young Women, or Aaronic Priesthood quorum instruction. Primary will meet for 55 minutes. The alternating schedule introduced with two-hour church in 2019 will be gone.¹ The First Presidency's March announcement put the change plainly: In the new schedule, sacrament meeting will continue to be no longer than 60 minutes. After a 5‑minute transition, youth and adults will attend a 25‑minute Sunday School class each week. Following another 5‑minute transition, they will attend a 25‑minute priesthood quorum, Relief Society, or Young Women meeting. Primary will continue to meet weekly and will now last 55 minutes.¹ The schedule is a modest administrative revision. The institution capable of making it, thoug...
Post a Comment
Read

Everything You Need to Know About the Salt Lake Temple

  The Salt Lake Temple will open to the public from April 5 through October 1, 2027, before it is rededicated and again restricted to Latter-day Saints with temple recommends. [2] Reservations opened on September 1, 2026, and one million tour spaces were claimed in less than 24 hours. [1] The Church describes the event as only the second public open house in the temple’s 134-year history. [2] The building visitors will enter is both old and substantially new. [12] [13] Construction began in 1853 and ended with the temple’s dedication in April 1893, but the interior has been altered repeatedly since then. [3] [20] The current renovation adds about 100,000 square feet of underground space, two baptistries instead of one, five instruction rooms, and 22 sealing rooms instead of 13. [12] The temple now rests on 98 base isolators about 20 feet below the structure, part of a seismic system designed to allow substantial horizontal movement during a major earthquake. [14] [24] The chan...
Post a Comment
Read

A Girl's Letters from Nauvoo.

On January 3, 1843, Charlotte Haven sat down in a small cottage overlooking the Mississippi and wrote to her parents in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She had arrived in Nauvoo only days earlier to spend the winter with her brother Henderson and his wife, Elizabeth. Haven was not a Latter-day Saint. Her skepticism appears in the opening lines: [1] As I write Nauvoo, I look at the word with perfect amazement, and almost doubt my own senses when I find myself an inhabitant of this city of fanatics, for never did I expect to see the place, far less to indite letters to my dear parents from it. [1] Haven's letters appeared nearly forty-eight years later in the Overland Monthly under the title "A Girl's Letters from Nauvoo." They are openly critical and should be read as one outsider's testimony, not as a neutral transcript. Still, she recorded small details that official histories often leave out: the bitter cold, muddy streets, unfinished homes, crowded worship services,...
Post a Comment
Read

Mormon Stories Fires Back: The Core Defenses Against the LDS Lawsuit

In April 2026, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its intellectual property arm, Intellectual Reserve, filed a federal lawsuit against the Open Stories Foundation and John Dehlin. The complaint alleges trademark infringement, copyright infringement, and consumer confusion arising from the use of the name Mormon Stories, its branding, and its use of Church-related images.      The Church portrays the case as a straightforward effort to protect its trademarks and prevent confusion among people seeking information about the faith. Mormon Stories sees the case very differently. In its response and counterclaim , the organization argues that the Church is attempting to claim ownership over a word that belongs to an entire religious movement while using intellectual property law against one of its most visible critics. Here are the major arguments at the center of the dispute.
1 comment
Read