Anticipating another Twin Towers controversy
September 8 2010, 8:19 am | | 12 Comments
Saatchi & Saatchi Paris has released a Twin Towers themed print ad that is bound to upset the American audience. Not for the same reasons as DDB Brazil’s much publicised “Tsunami” scam ad that stirred up award shows and saw a toughening of entry rules, but Americans, justifiably, do get a little sensitive over 9/11 themed ads. The ad is getting panned on Ads of the World and has just popped up on Adfreak.
12 Comments
WTF. Saatchi what are thinking!!
The biggest problem I have with this ad is that it’s not even good.
Bad ad
Bad taste
Bad idea
If it wasn’t for the blood of many thousands of Americans, the cu#@s would be speaking German today.
And I’m not American, but my grandfather fought on Juno beach to liberate them.
When scam is seen as the blight that it truly is, we can all move on and do our jobs without desperate shit like this turning our industry into a laughing stock.
I have to say that, once more, I’m ashamed of the state we’ve got ourselves into.
And it’s always saatchis.
did no one in the office turn around and say maybe this was not a good idea?
Couldn’t be any more offensive than this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt_tv7t79WY
Clearly they did not anticipate the backlash they’ll be getting…
They need to learn to anticipate the shits is coming and hits the fan. That’s gonna be really messy.
i’m sure some people did. but the CD probably said “who’s the boss?”
This has to be a joke, why would a Paris based newspaper, that translates articles from every language into French, produce an ad with an English end-line? Either way, I’m sure Courrier & Saatchi’s are in damage control, this is so offensive, but surely they’d have anticipated that.
Yeah, scam sucks. Especially when the scam in question sucks.
It makes me seriously question the state this industry we’re in.
About scam:
I recently worked for a French guy who was all over the TBWA Paris awards blitz of 2002-2006 (not Erik, but someone just below him). Not only was he an utter c*** but he didn’t believe that good work could be done on actual briefs and his level of scamming I found ridiculous. He was convinced that 95% of the work at Cannes isn’t real and he also said to me that all his awards he won were from things that never ran. He also told me that at TBWA they hired freelance teams for doing their day to day, paying work, and the bulk of the creatives there were hired just to do scam. It’s a practice that is starting to be more common in agencies. I recently heard of a few agencies in Dubai that do the same. They hire teams that only work on spec work… and then they have the monkeys for the actual work.
I walked home a particular way when I was working in Auckland in 2006. I’d always pass the billboards in Parnell. One day, I saw a billboard for TVNZ, something to do with CSi or a crime show and it had black light on the billboard. However the black light didn’t work. It wasn’t strong enough to light up the billboard’s UV ink to make the message readable. It was just a white billboard. A few days later I was walking past when I saw one of the seniors from Saatchis Auckland and a photographer take a picture of this white billboard. Next month I saw it in Campaign brief and on the sites but it was not how it looked at all. They photoshopped the words onto the billboard and claimed that it worked.
In the pursuit of awards we kind of forget about our morals…
http://www.fastcompany.com/pics/worst-most-exploitive-911-themed-ads