Hasta La Creative!

“We express regret that the ad should have caused a controversy. But we will not shun responsibility for controversial content.

We express our apology for the harm caused to the African people because of the spread of the ad and the over-amplification by the media. We sincerely hope the public and the media will not over-read it.”

The company also said that they “had never thought about the issue of racism” when they created the ad. The company has pulled all the copies they have control over of the ad online, but it can be found in countless news outlets anyway, such as Al Jazeera, BBC News, Financial Times, CNBC, and The Drum.

Qiaobi ?? – Black man washed = Chinese man (2016) :30 (China)

While these outlets react at how the ad can be seen as racist, we at Adland will simply Badland it. This ad is a remake of an Italian washing powder ad created back in 2007. Right down to the music choice – and possibly the pun. This isn’t the first time a company in a far off and has simply copied an idea they’ve seen elsewhere, and made it worse. We have countless example like the copy machine copies here, and often discuss the difference between inevitable Creative Outcomes and demo-love. A straight up rip-off seems to be what happened here, as if the marketing director saw the Itailian advert, and decided to ask the agency to just do exactly that.

Coloreria Italiana – Coloured is better – (2007) :40 (Italy)

That wasn’t the only terrible pun created for the Italian washing powder company, they also ran this ad which ends on an even groan-worthier one. Here the roles are changed as the man tosses his wife into the washer when she demands that he do the laundry, but he doesn’t get quite what he expected.

Coloreria Italiana – Husbands Revenge (2007) :50 (Italy)

So while the world currently decries the racism in the Qiaobi ?? ad, nobody seemed to mind much at all back in 2007 when the reverse happened in the Italian ad. Different cultural frame of reference, you see. And the issue of plagiarism other peoples work is lost once again. It’s fascinating to me that when ads reach a global audience, they tend to fall on the United States/western world of ad sensibilities – apparently we are all Americans in the internet? Other examples of this phenomena was when The Heinz “kiss” and UK Snickers ad was banned for homophobia, by complaints from the USA, and my personal fave when KFC Australia had to pull a cricket related ad because US people thought feeding the opposing (west Indian) team fried chicken was racist.

What’s offensive in some company, is not in others. For example, in Sweden after dinner the hostess will offer “påtår”, that is a second cup of after dinner coffee. This is almost always accepted, in fact it’s seen as a little rude to leave after the first cup and will have the hostess wondering what went wrong. Meanwhile, if you offer a second cup to your dinner guests and they are from the southern United States, they will take this as a discreet hint to leave. Awkward.

Advertising agencies have, for global brands, been creating campaigns that in theory should work all over the world for years – though Coca Cola will seemingly never understand why we won’t buy it for christmas in Sweden. The “universal idea” and global advertising will never have the opportunity to target our very different cultural sensibilities – and the internet is quite the helper alerting the not-target-market about an ad they should take offense to. Meanwhile, in supermarkets in China, someone who actually is the target market might just pick up some Qiaobi ??. And that, my friends, is the only thing the ad set out to achieve – the Chinese brand doesn’t care what people in the UK think about their ad.

“Senator Sanders’ powerful message resonates with a lot of Americans, particularly young people,” Jason Farmer, senior creative director at the AHF, said in a press release. “We hope that our lighthearted – but highly important – billboard campaign for STD testing will as well.”

The subway posters went up last week and the tagline on each posters leads to the freestdcheck.com website, but the logo looks deceptively like Bernie Sanders campaign logo and a variant of Bernie Sanders slogan. I’m a little surprised that FreeSTDCheck.com haven’t met some legal issues yet, but I suppose it falls under “parody”, despite being obvious commercial speech.

Another controversial billboard from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation was the “Tinder & Grindr” one, which Tinder demanded they remove it as it insinuated STD’s were spread via the app. Tinder sent a cease & desist; “These unprovoked and wholly unsubstantiated accusations are made to irreparably damage Tinder’s reputation in an attempt to encourage others to take an HIV test offered by your organization”.

But the AHF were unphrased and responded: “Rather than trying to chill AHF’s public health message by threatening AHF with frivolous lawsuits, AHF urges Tinder to support its message of sexual health awareness by encouraging Tinder users to get tested for STIs and to get treated promptly if they have an infection.”

But now we have another contender, a great contender. A tre-men-dous group of Canadian based creatives, really like these guys, they’re very nice and I love their families they have great families, who have come up with “Cards against humanity – Trump edition”. I mean, look, I’m for it, but look – it’s been done before. Sid Lee failed to find that has already been done as a Kickstarter months ago. I mean, look at this. You failed to reach the finish line first, you’re fired. Okay?

“I’m here tonight to introduce you to a wonderful new idea that my team has been working on for a long time, and we are so proud of it. So proud. Everyone here I’m sure has heard of Cards Against Humanity, right? It’s a party card game that took the world by storm after it was first introduced right here on Kickstarter.” – so says the Kickstarter created by Scott_H, but wait, his kickstarter failed to reach funding. He too, is fired.

Jeffry Da Silva is the co-executive creative director at Canada-based ad agency Sid Lee, and Trump Against Humanity began at the “Sid Lee Collective”, an incubator inside Sid Lee where employees can develop non-commercial creative projects not tied to the work they’re doing with clients. In other words, where people just do fun stuff because they can.

Jeffry Da Silva had the idea around the beginning of the primaries, because “There was a period of about two or three weeks when there was just a massive amount of Trump lines in the news.”

“We were watching CNN at night, we were watching clips on YouTube and Fox News and everything. We had a bunch of team members scouring the Internet for the best line. We made a short list and we put them into the cards.”

Jeffry Da Silva and the team were looking for Trump sayings that would suit the cards against humanity level of ridiculousness. The team ultimately only elected to put about 30 Trump statements in the deck, his “best words”. In the end at least the Sid Lee set of cards were created, there are 100 packs of the game sitting around the Sid Lee offices in Toronto.
They posted about the game on the Sid Lee collective blog last week and it went “viral”, as the kids say. If you want a pack you should go to trumpagainsthumanity.cards and ask for one before they all vanish. There’s a tremendous risk you won’t be one of the hundred people who get a deck, unless you hurry. Look. We have to hurry. We gotta get this done, ahead of schedule and under budget.