Chris,
It's crazy that you posted this today, because I came across the print version of it yesterday. It truly is horrifying. It's vile, and it capitalizes on one tragedy and turns it into a foreboding, scary movie trailer.
But the biggest problem is the WWF never ran this ad. And it's STILL going to bite them in the ass.
The simple story is this ad was created on spec (aka wholly as their idea) by an ad agency. The ad was then summarily denounced and dejected by the organization, who would never run such an ad.
What sucks is this is a ton of shit on the WWF that they don't need. And DDB, the company that made the ad, seems to be taking no hits whatsoever.
Read it here.But the WWF says the image was created on specifications by a Brazilian ad agency and was rejected.
"WWF strongly condemns this offensive and tasteless ad, and did not authorize its production or publication," the group said in a news release issued late Tuesday.
"It is an unauthorized use of our logo and we are aggressively pursuing action to have it removed from websites where it is being currently featured.
Somehow I find the print ad more offensive than the video.
ReplyDeleteI don't know that I'd be so against it, except, what message is it bringing across? It's like a playground fight. "My daddy's tragedy is bigger than YOUR daddy's tragedy!" Why compare? 9/11 and the tsunami - both really fucking sad.
Offensive or not - that's sort of the point. I find the ads amazingly effective. They allow us to take a tragedy we've experienced, one that we can comprehend if only by evocation of terrible history, and then goes on the give us a bit of a scale on the whole thing. It brings attention to the real consequences of global climate change, something that is often too abstract for people to take seriously. In a way, I applaud this ad agency for saying something that needed to be said.
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