Here's the ad (via NY Daily News):
It's certainly arresting, a little bit terrifying, and a whole lotta
provocative. But it makes me wonder about using other national
tragedies in marketing campaigns. It would probably be acceptable to
say the tsunami was 100 times worse than the Titanic, or the Lusitania.
I think everybody who lived through those events are dead, and for gods sake, if we can make it a musical, we can make it a poster. It would
probably be OK (if a little weird) to say the tsunami was X times worse
than Pearl Harbor, but even thinking about that advertisement starts to
sting in whatever part of my brain gauges public indignation. If the ad had featured a series of waves bearing down on the French Quarter in New Orleans with the text "Imagine 100 Katrinas..." I imagine the outcry would be pretty great, since the hurricane's wound is still quite raw, and Louisiana hasn't made a full recovery yet. I wonder whether 9/11 being an act of war permanently scars any serious cultural reference to the event or whether, as the "too soon" comment implies, it is simply a matter of time before an ad like this is seen and considered, rather than seen and censured.
Edit note: Even searching for a picture to accompany this story on the homepage has been an awkward wrestling match between "It's about 9/11, of course you can put a picture of the towers there" vs. "Something about these pictures still burns a little too provocatively."
I "wonder" why they didn't compare against another natural disaster. Why compare a natural disaster to a man made disaster?
Mabe it's to "generate" man made publicity.
Consider the parallel of 9/11 to other mass-destruction events. D-Day, Pearl Harbor, which happened in more distant history. To use those events as fodder for a marketing goal is absurd. It trivializes the lives lost.
It bears repeating: Lives were lost.
PETA has compared the number of lives lost in the Holocaust to the number of broiler chickens killed for food. That didn't go over too well, either. A little different, since it conflates the comparison of two events with the animals vs. people issue, though.
People who think animal lives are more valuable than human lives have psychological issues. Most PETA members are members because it's trendy and makes them feel important.
Well it would certainly depend on what the AD was trying to accomplish. But in this example, I don't think the question is "when." It will always be inappropriate to make such a comparison regardless if survivors or survivor's families are alive.
...and there were 70 times more Jews killed during the Holocaust than the Asian Tsunami. It just isn't a good way to try to make a point.
Those who use disasters of any type to promote or advertise are of the basest lot. Any shred of dignity or integrity would keep a person from creating an image like this. It is one thing to produce documentaries, or even an informative movie, but to promote your ideals or business on the graves of the dead, and on the hearts of the living, is beyond belief.
This type of advertisement does nothing but show the depravity of these "marketing" people; that they will fall to any depth, to try to make a dollar. For them, nothing is sacred.
Those who would make these things have lost a part of what makes us "human"; emotionally they have de-evolved into something less than human. Their morals, if they ever had any, have been sacrificed on the alter of greed. Compassion and sensibility is missing from their lives.
Unfortunately, the controversy will, more than likely, provide them with more business, rather than turn them into the business pariahs that they deserve to be.
The World Wildlife Fund seems to have shot themselves in the foot. There are a number of people who have come to identify environmentalist, conservations etc. - groups and individuals, as terrorist. All too often their efforts to protect the environment appear to be an attack on human beings. From this point of view, their advertising photo image seems to match their modus operandi.