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I'd agree - this would be a stark, but powerful ad for the Red Cross....Depending on whether it avoided pissing off more people than it made think.

But the WWF?

WTF?

EDIT: To be sure, they rejected the ad. But what was the designer thinking?

This is one of those examples where people are all sitting around a message board echo chamber, not nearly so cool as ours, where everyone is all like:

"Frackin' Republicans and their wars. Screw them. They don't know what a real threat is - that we really should be going to war against carbon."

"Yeah. Screw them. How many people died in 9/11 anyway? Compare that to the End of the Earth. Morons."

"You know, that would be a great tee shirt, all the planes crashing and how stupid and small it was. That would be awesome."

"Lets do it! They are going to feel so stupid when they see this!"

Ehn, I think of it as one designer comparing the scale of two disasters. The smaller-casualty disaster, 9/11, was much more iconic and visual than untold miles of devastated coastline. Something like this just makes the scale of the tsunami nightmarishly apparent.

The problem is that the WWF has jack-all to do with tsunamis or disaster relief.

I suddenly wonder if the designer had that as a concept and just slapped the logo of whoever ey was trying to sell it to at the time.

it's entirely possible he did the work, said "holy fuck this is awesome" and tried to long-shot it at the client. i've done stuff like that (not stuff like that, but like, well, you know) where you come up with an awesome idea that doesn't quite fit but you put it in the pile anyway because it's so damn awesome.

i don't see any ideological malice or bias in it, personally. just awesome/powerful image.

then again, i also like the nyc doh's new set of soda turning into human fat ads.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/pr2009/pr057-09.shtml

of course i can't find the high res version but it's pretty damn awesome.

The way you deal with terrorists is... Well it's fucking complicated and YMMV.
The way you deal with nature is, you give people property rights. Then they create wealth with them, and then they use it to build infrastructure, buy insurance, move to high ground etc. Because when people got a little coin to rattle around in their pockets, they start looking for ways to protect it.

It's a pretty powerful ad, and I like it on that level, but it also seems like the kind of thing that the designers should have known would piss people off. Some things, no matter how well executed, are probably not a good fit for cultural/political reasons. I mean, if you're advertising fried chicken, you probably shouldn't illustrate it with a shot of a happy Black family and throw in some watermelon too because, hey, everybody likes watermelon.

I am kind of tempted to make a few spoof ads like, "The tsunami killed more than 200,000 times as many people as Teddy Kennedy" or something.

(I'm reminded of those people who said tsunamis were nature's revenge on our environmental-poisoning ways. Yes, vast, mindless hunks of rock decided to interact with the thin scum of life we call the "biosphere" because of what some organisms in it were doing to other organisms. Fuckwits.)

true. i would ok this for an ad in europe or whatever. i would caution them that it would cause a shitfit but i don't think the overall message would be too terrible. (i'm presuming this aimed at fundraising for humanitarian relief groups, mind you, not a conservationist group.)

Right.

http://www.1010wins.com/COMMENT-PIC---Nightmarish--Ad-Creates-Controversy/5132530

"the people responsible have been fired"

Well, "The team in question is no longer with the agency. " They may have left months ago for unrelated issues.

I doubt this would be worth firing for in Brazil.

Until they get enough coin to afford beachfront property :)

it woulda been funnier had i written "the people responsible have been killed."

it's bog-standard crisis communications, rather than letting it blow over (because they're a fucking ad agency, not a trappist community after all) you find yourself a suitable scapegoat and scape them.

I do believe that global warming is a problem and cutting carbon emissions a desirable thing to do, but all that has FUCK-ALL to do with earthquakes and tsunamis. Jesus Christ. It's like using the threat of a Yellowstone supervolcanic eruption to encourage people to recycle aluminum cans.

I think the general idea is that you should care about global disaster in the abstract without thinking about the particulars so you feel obliged to write checks also without thinking about the particulars.

Without the captions it would have looked to me like an ordinary day showing the routine approach paths to LaGuardia and Newark Airports. My only regret is the ad wasn't somehow linked to PETA.

I think I would run a counter-ad that said, "The tsunami killed 10 times as many people as 9-11. On the other hand, it killed less than 1/10th as many people as the Nazi Holocaust."

Then show a B&W photo of a starving waif behind barbed wire, but grayed out, except for a vertical strip in the middle that covers 10% of the photo's area. Or something like that.

And then: "Giving other people power to run our lives: now that's deadly."

it lacks simplicity, which is the major reason why the original ad is so fucking amazing. seriously, i'm jazzed. i probably shouldn't be but it's pressing all the good design buttons in my brain rather than the hide under the couch ptsd buttons.

I wish I worked for an outfit that had ideas 1/10 as ballsy as that.

Better idea, have the first add placed into the background of a holocaust picture being used as that ad, then have the holocaust ad itself be featured in the background of another ad that uses a woodblock print of the sufferers of the Black Death, and have the caption be "The Holocaust killed less than 1/8 the number of people who died in the Black Death. Falling into traps where we use the death toll as the sole determiner of how bad an event was; now that's tragic."

http://gothamist.com/2009/09/02/video_ddb_brazil_made_a_911-inspire.php

zoinks!

I have seen numerous comments to the effect of "car accidents/X disease/something else killed 10 times/15 times/as many people as 9/11." There have been all kinds of pundits who have thrown around quotes "if Osama gets his hands on nukes/anthrax/cyclon b the death toll will be X times as bad as 9/11." (I've even made one such comparison myself.)

So I can't fault the ad on that grounds.

I think evoking the imagery of 9/11 is the problem here.

Agreed.

I don't get the logic behind the ad...so if our planet is an uncaring mass murderer, why are we supposed to care for it again? It seems like it would be an argument to DESTROY it with a war on terrrr.

EDIT: This answers my question:

Maybe part of it, but the main problem -- at least for me -- is the utter lack of connection between the two threats (tsunamis and carbon-burning stuff) discussed in the ad. Unlike car accidents or even terrorist attacks, earthquakes and tsunamis are NOT threats that can be avoided if only people do X instead of Y. Worried about global warming or air pollution? Fine, cutting carbon emissions makes excellent sense. But earthquakes and tsunamis existed loooooong before anybody knew how to burn petroleum, and they'll still be here loooooooong after humanity goes extinct.

I don't think so. According to the article, the ad copy stated "The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it." What "preservation" techniques are we supposed to adopt to prevent future undersea seismic tremors?

Move to orbit?

what i meant was in my hypothetical (approving the ad) if it were aimed at raising money for a relief group overseas (europe, south america, asia) it would have made sense. for the world wildlife fund, not so much.

9/11 has become the unit vector against which all tragedy scalars are multiplied.

OK, I'm stealing that.

"Respect and preserve," hell! I think we should hunt down and destroy this "brutally powerful" planet before it kills again!!!

"We had to destroy the village planet in order to save it."

Yeah, well we could nuke each other and kill six billion in 45 minutes. So suck it, earth.