Oct 07
If you don’t read AdWeek you, like me, may have missed the controversy around an ad that was produced for the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) that tried to get people to understand the loss of life for the 2004 Tsunami by comparing it to the loss of life in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. The video shows two planes hitting the towers and then shows a sky full of planes heading towards New York City. The ad may have appeared briefly in Brazil before the defecation hit the rotary oscillator.
Is this ad just too soon? Would we ever be able to look at an ad like this and not cringe? It seems to me I have seen ads that show a nuclear explosion and certainly that is more shocking. What do you think?
via WWF: 9/11 ad ’should never have been made’
October 7th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
From a closeup eyewitness to 9-11, it will always be too soon. I support WWF and appreciate the devastation of the tsunami, but 9-11 was so evil and not a natural disaster. While I see the point and the message I don’t see the comparison. This ad was upsetting and not because of the need to protect our planet but to relive the evil of the attacks.
October 7th, 2009 at 11:43 pm
It’s not a question of how long, I think it is and always will be inappropriate. I can’t imagine an ad ever being produced based on Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima. Something went horribly wrong in the decision to produce this and common sense was left at the door. There was more intent to get noticed than to be effective.
November 26th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
The ad seems to deliberately want to shock. Shocking entices interest and being noticed, nowadays everything else just passes unnoticed.
January 10th, 2010 at 2:56 am
“One of the worst tragedies in the history of humanity” Please, give me a break. In the long history of evil that humans have perpetrated on other humans (e.g. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, the killing fields of Cambodia, and on, and on, and on…) 9/11 doesn’t even qualify as a minor footnote.
BTW, depending on whom you ask, the number of innocent people killed in Iraq alone since the U.S. invasion is ~100,000 to over 600,000.