What's the LAST thing a professional sports team should make light of? (TW: Domestic Violence)

(The "Trigger Warning" in the headline was a spoiler, but I really don't want to re-victimize anyone who has been brutalized by a partner.)

Salon reports that the Cleveland Cavaliers, a National Basketball Association team, decided to run a parody ad on their in-game digital scoreboard that made fun of rival Chicago Bulls.

First, here's the United Healthcare ad they were parodying:

Here's their version:

Salon's Joanna Rothkopf writes, "the spot, coupled with the recent hire of sexual harasser Isiah Thomas to run the W.N.B.A.’s Liberty franchise as president, indicates that the NBA is completely unaware and unable to address the epidemic of violence towards women plaguing professional sports."

I have to admit, when I first watched the video, for a second I thought the criticism was misplaced because it could have been intended to show that he simply (but cruelly) failed to catch her. But then, when the camera lingered on the wounded woman on the floor, there was no doubt in my mind that it was intended to show him hurting her. For laughs. Because... "go, team, go"?

The video was deleted from Vimeo, where it purportedly once had an official online home, but was captured and reposted on YouTube by basketball writer Steve McPherson, with the comment "Domestic violence is super hilarious. Right, guys? Right? Hello?"

I have no doubt that the makers of the video didn't think they were doing anything wrong. But this kind of cluelessness is inexcusable, and not just because of the many pro athletes who have been charged with partner abuse. The fans can be a problem as well.

A few years ago, The Globe and Mail's Marina Adshade wrote about research into how watching football is a trigger for domestic violence in some men:

Using twelve years of U.S. data from police reports of violent domestic incidents on Sundays during the professional football season and point spreads made by Las Vegas bookmakers for football games (as a way of measuring if fans expected the game to be a victory or loss), the authors of this paper found that when a home team was predicted to win by four or more points and instead lost the game the level of violence perpetuated by men against their wives and girlfriends increases by a remarkable 10 per cent. This violence was isolated in a narrow window immediately following the end of the game and the number of acts of family violence increases as games became more important. 

On the other hand, if the team was expected to lose, and did in fact lose, there was no increase in domestic violence; likewise for when the team was expected to lose and won instead.

So, to even lightheartedly correlate super-fandom with domestic violence (and, in the end, control) is simply appalling. And stupid for the brand.

Bic learns the difference between comedy and advertising

Obviously inspired by the culturally-charged humour of Sacha Baron Cohen, some creatives at CP+B developed this funny little skit for Bic Canada.



You can see the gag coming, but in ad terms it helps to underscore the product benefit of Bic pens' presumed reliability (versus the crap he uses). It's a solid piece of work.

The problem is, branded advertising is not comedy. When Baron Cohen parodies Kazakhs, Austrians, homosexuals, North Africans or the British underclass for purposes of lampooning prejudice, it is art. Silly, dick joke, art at times. But the only brand he represents is his own.

This is where advertisers need to tread carefully. A "banned" ad has great potential for viral takeoff. But as more and more people see the agency's skit (which is mostly good for their brand)  the more people are exposed to the client's brand in a negative context.

Here in Canada, that context is "racism":

Bic Canada began hearing from consumers who were offended by the ad almost immediately, and by Tuesday afternoon, the day after its launch, had decided to pull it off the air. As of Thursday afternoon, it had received 48 e-mails complaining about the commercial. 

Most of those messages mentioned the fact that the viewers were offended by the racial tone of the ads. Complaints included descriptions of the ad as being “racist,” “insensitive” and “tasteless.” 

A fine-print disclaimer at the beginning of the ad specifies that the setting is a “fictitious country,” but this did not mollify viewers. 

“People just found it offensive,” said company spokesperson Linda Kwong. “...We’re trying to do the right thing.” 

Bic Canada announced the retraction on Thursday, once it was sure the commercial had been pulled from all of its TV channels.

Here's the problem: we live in a multicultural society. Other cultures are no longer impersonal caricatures for our arrogant amusement. They are our friends, neighbours, coworkers — and customers.

Parodying Asian dictatorship (obviously a shot at North Korea) with a fictitious language was bound to offend people. As a bonus, they make light of the human rights abuses that organizations like Amnesty International fight so hard to get people mobilized to stop.

Just dumb, guys. Do your sketch comedy on your own time and dime, where you can answer for your own choices. Bic has pens to sell, and PR fires to put out.

Via Copyranter and The Globe and Mail

F'd Ad Fridays: Young Lions — unleash your... creativity?

Oh, that is some really unfortunate art direction right there. Especially for "Canada’s official representative for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity."

Via Black Bag Career Central

Reinvent a Canada in which print is not dead?

What an ballsy way to launch a redesign!

Adrants posted this Globe and Mail ad, in which an iconoclastic young woman on a bicycle tells Canadians to forget about their country's past accomplishments, and put all eyes on the future:



From the YouTube link:

On the first of October, The Globe and mail will reveal a new look.

This change coincides with the launch of a discussion that begins in our pages, but ultimately lives beyond them.

We hope, and intend, for this discussion to strike at the heart of how Canadians define ourselves, and our nation. It is meant to go beyond words. We hope it will become a turning point.

We need to re-examine Canadian institutions, and conceits, that we hold dear. Instead of locking ourselves in celebrations of the past, we want to explore our future -- and all we can do to make it brilliant.

But what really can eight discussions over two months achieve? We hope they ignite a million great Canadian debates, at breakfast tables and board tables.

Start with The Globe and Mail. From there, it's up to you.

Canada, it's our time to lead.

While I appreciate the bold sentiment, I believe that there shouldn't be such a radical break between past and future. All breakthroughs built on other people's work. If people had to reinvent the wheel every generation, they never would have invented the car! (Or, indeed, the bicycle!)

On the other hand, it's also good to understand that we're making history every moment. It just seems ironic that this call-to-arms is coming from a medium that is so representative of the old way of communicating...

Lingua franca

Most of the work we do at Acart is either for governments, national associations, or regional audiences. So we are very much used to both the rules and the sensitivities around Canada's bilingualism.

For example, with creative copy you never use the word "translate". If a concept is developed in English, then a francophone Copywriter or Creative Director needs to be involved at early stages to ensure that the message can work in a different but equal French language version.

Unlike large consumer clients, ours are either not allowed or can't afford to do unique creative for French and English Canada. So we do our best to go beyond specifics of wordplay and cultural in-jokes to reach more universal Canadian touchpoints.

It's not ideal, but at least we try. And after all these years of trying to reconcile the two solitudes in advertising, it was a little shocking to see the Government of Quebec dismissing other French Canadians.

This was in today's Globe and Mail:

French-speaking residents of Ontario said they were insulted and angry when they received English-only advertising brochures promoting snowmobiling in Quebec. The brochures, sent to 145,000 households in Ontario, vaunt Quebec's snowy trails as "A Ride Worth the Drive."

Some francophones in Ontario, home to the largest community of French Canadians outside Quebec, say they would rather stay home instead.

They said they were incredulous that the government of a province whose official language is French would mail out English-only advertising to the more than half-million francophones who live next door.

"What were they thinking?" asked Mariette Carrier-Fraser, president of the Assemblée de la francophonie de l'Ontario. "We would have thought that a province that's a majority francophone would want to maintain links with other francophones in the country."

What were they thinking indeed? This little language flap gives an interesting insight into Canadian language politics, and one which I'm sure is familiar to my Franco Ontarian friends and neighbours.

Everyone's told and re-told stories of French Canadians getting a hard time in France, but I grew up also hearing stories of Les Ontariens who were as French as toast being berated and snubbed for their dialect when they wandered too far away from the other side of the Ottawa River. I've witnessed situations where a Quebecker "corrected" the French of an Ontario francophone — to their face.

On the other side, during the last referendum I still recall a spokesperson for Maritime Acadians talking about what a raw deal Quebec separation would be for them, but that Quebec didn't care about francophone communities in the rest of Canada.

The CBC coverage quoted Tourisme Québec citing "budgetary constraints" as the reason for the snub:

"We made the choice to produce this ad campaign for markets in New England and Ontario, where the majority of people are anglophone," said Michel-André Roy, communications director for the Ministry of Tourism in Quebec.

If this is a common attitude, then it's sad. Since the Trudeau years, Canada has made bilingualism a national agenda. Not everyone has been happy with it, but regardless the Federal Government and many national advertisers have been ignoring the kind of "budgetary constraint" that Tourisme Québec finds so important, instead going along with laws and programs that support minority language rights on the national stage.

Again from the Globe:

Jean-Marie Leduc, a retired federal civil servant, complained to the Quebec government after he received the English-only pamphlets last week.

"I get advertising in French from Canadian Tire and Loblaws, why can't the Quebec government do the same thing?" Mr. Leduc asked in an interview from his home in Ottawa. "They're not respecting my language."

"This is an insult. To not recognize there are francophones outside Quebec is just an insult," Mr. Leduc said.

I'd love to hear from francophone readers — Quebec and otherwise — about their thoughts on this issue. Are Quebec's fights for language rights only for Quebeckers? Has it all really been about protecting the culture of an island of French in a sea of English — or myopic nationalism?

In defence of oafism

My colleague Christopher sent me a new column, written by a friend of his at the Globe and Mail, about the rash of stupid and goofy male stereotypes in advertising:

If they're not messing up your house, running into glass doors or trying in vain to outsmart an air freshener, you'll find them eating the inedible or falling down for no reason whatsoever.

At least, that's what some advertisers would have you believe. More and more marketers are trying to tap into the overwhelming buying power of wives and mothers at the expense of their other halves. Dads are dumb, boyfriends are bumbling and husbands are utterly hopeless as brands strive to relate to women by showing men as especially goofy or incompetent.

The article quotes a women's marketing specialist who decries the apparent double standard. "If we ever did that to women, it would be so politically incorrect."

This is not the first time "oafism" has become an issue in current popular culture. From the Honeymooners to the Simpsons, TV shows have always found the "bumbling male with a heart of gold" stereotype successful.

As a bumbling male with a heart of gold who writes ads, I don't really have a problem with it. It may aim for the cheap seats, in terms of humour, but I don't think it's really harming the status of men. There are very few stereotypes you're still allowed to make fun of these days. I don't mind that one of them is mine.

The worst you could say is that cardboard stereotypes like Ray Romano's old TV character show creative laziness on the part of writers, and don't really give male or female audiences a lot of intellectual or cultural credit. On the other hand, classic literature has been using antiheroes to get laughs since time immemorial.

While it was once dumb-ass noblemen with witty servants, since the 1950s the stereotype has been oafish husband and clever wife. What interests me now is that women seem more offended by what the stereotype implies than men — perhaps exactly because making fun of "the man" shows that the societal power relationship is still all-too-often lopsided.

But why do men put up with being put down?

A couple of years back, I was in a focus group where we were testing several TV concepts in storyboard. One of them featured a lovable yet goofy everyman. A woman in the audience complained about the apparent sexism. "Why is it the man who always ends up looking stupid?" she insisted.

A man in the group countered: "Because we like it that way. That's how we get away with dumb stuff."

Amen, brother, but keep it quiet! Now excuse me while I pretend I don't know how to boil an egg.