There’s a fine line sometimes between attention grabbing and offensive. This particular ad goes WAY over it. It’s quite possibly the worst ad I’ve ever seen. The caption reads: “The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it.”
The World Wildlife Fund, which has put a lot of effort into making clever advertisements lately, is disavowing this tasteless piece, describing it as “… a concept offered by an outside advertising agency seeking our business.”
I’m giving WWF the benefit of the doubt on this one. I can’t believe they would commission something like this.
Hat tip to the Green Sheet on this one.
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I find it disturbing that anyone would even consider this to be “clever.” It’s not just tasteless, it’s abusive to anyone who lost a loved on on 9/11. I didn’t happen to, but I can imagine the shock and outrage this ad could instill in folks affected by the terrorist attack ~ their grief-stricken worst nightmares illustrated for the benefit of a completely un-related organization.
They need some tips from you, Eric! Positive message, people’s faces, help us feel the need, don’t slap us in the face.
Don’t you watch the news? This ad was NEVER approved by the World Wildlife Federation. It was a proposed ad that got nixed by the WWF. Because the WWF logo was used on it, the WWF has sued the people who produced it!
This is a powerful and disturbing ad that uses the images we associate with horror and takes into a new realm. That realm of environmental degradation is powerful and disturbing and most of the planet sits with there heads in the sand. I don’t mind being shaken up by this ad and asked to think … hard.
Consider that this may be a blessing in disguise for WWF. Because they neither produced, solicited or approved the ad they have not just plausible deniability, but deniabillity in fact (yes, there still is a difference).
Yet a the attention-grabbing ad remains seared into the mind at no cost, either financial or political. The more they try to pin it on WWF the more foolish an opponent looks.
It, not so subtly makes the point about the relative priority of global environmental and law enforcement priorities.
A more effective way to tie these together is to reject the notion of these two problems as competing priorities, but as linked problems.
The dominant change in the world security situation in the past generation I would characterize as this: Unites States national security faces greater threats from nations that are too weak than from nations that are too strong. In the 20th century, the great national security challenges were from other powerful nation states: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Untion.
The problems we now face are from nonstate actors who thrive in the chaos of failed or failing states. Proplems such as : piracy, narcotics trafficing, terrorist safe havens, chronic civil wars and others exist because the states which nominally control territory not not actually control it.
Global warming is very likley to push several new states over the brink and cause greater chaos. This is the connection.