• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, May 14, 2004

When the horse farted in someone's face, I didn't say a word. I didn't flinch when I saw examples of women shaving product logos into their pubic hair. I didn't really care if bases in MLB were covered with spider webs. Clearly others did, but I wasn't one of them. Having been part of the advertising industry for more than thirty years I try to understand the strategy behind ads that most of the public find offensive. I give benefit of the doubt to marketers who try to stand out from the clutter and grab attention in some offbeat way.

But everyone has his limits, and this week, I reached mine. In a two page spread that I saw in Ad Age (it might have run elsewhere, but that's where I saw it) PointRoll, the rich media company in an effort to draw attention to a new offering called TomBoy, showed photos of children who I guess are supposed to have been "beaten up" by the little girl (aka: tom boy) on the opposite page. The "beaten" boys, all about 10 or 11, are unconscious with blood flowing from various injuries.

At first glance. And at second. And even on the long shocked, incredulous third, the children appear to be dead. The scene looks like the photos you see of terrorist bombings in the Middle East - and a couple of times - on these shores. The shoe of one victim is missing, resting a few feet away as is often the case with bodies in bombings or airline crashes. The sky overhead is dark and somber looking just too much like smoke.

I showed the ad to my wife who has also been in and around advertising for nearly three decades and she withdrew in horror. "What where they thinking?" she asked, but in a far more off-colorful way.

The ad business side of me rationalizes the strategy, the lame attempt to tie the new product to the tom boy in the ad, but the human side of me tries to envision a bunch of PointRoll execs sitting around a table reviewing this ad and thinking, "Yeah, that's cool, that will do the trick." It is utterly inconceivable to me that any of them let this atrocity get into the final review stack, much less think it appropriate to run.

What happened to all that post 9/11 sensitivity that the ad business pledged to honor? With Americans dying daily in Iraq, with newspapers filled with the grim results of terrorist attacks, how could anyone run pictures that remotely suggested dead children? How could Ad Age accept such an image? I know that times are tough, but there is simply no excuse for accepting this ad.

A few pages away in the same issue of Ad Age, a Deutsch executive writing on behalf of the Advertising Education Foundation, laments that college professors who teach prospective adverting executives, have a low opinion of advertising as a career. Said one professor "It seems like a fluffy occupation filled with puffery, in which you have to close your eyes about a lot of things."

This is one time NOT to close your eyes. Join me in telling the PointRoll and Ad Age folks that they have stepped so far over the line that they ought to run a two page, 4 color apology in the same space.

And then fire whoever presented this abominable idea. I have never been so ashamed to say I work in this industry.