It's too bad this one is not very funny. While Mayor Ford's bizarre statements and behaviour are fair fodder, as far as I'm concerned, his weight and alleged substance abuse problems are more problematic material.
According to the Toronto Sun, who snapped this screencap:
A cheeky American budget airline swears it wasn’t smoking crack when it offered cheap airfare Thursday, including a $29.90 one-way ticket to the Toronto region.
Spirit Airlines assured fliers in an online ad that they don’t smoke the illegal drug Mayor Rob Ford has recently confessed to using, in a bid to sell ultra-low airfare including a $29.90 one-way ticket to the Niagara Falls, NY airport.
The capture is dated November 14. It seems to have been removed from their site.
The Rob Ford saga has continues to provide the world with its recommended daily allowance of Schadenfreude as the elected Mayor of Toronto vows to keep his position despite admissions that he bought and smoked crack in office, having had numerous lies to Council exposed, misuse of City funds, and accusations of being a dangerous boozer and a general nasty guy.
Poor Toronto. In terms of municipal PR, Mayor Ford is worse than SARS. But somehow I doubt the Rolling Stones, AC/DC and Rush will come to the aid of the shamed megacity.
Its advertising community, however, has. Two art directors at john st., Hannah Smit and Marie Richer, have slapped together an online campaign, #MORETHANFORD, to show all the things about Toronto that don't revolve around the Mayor in a drunken stupor:
The women spent two days asking everyone around them what they love about the city, and then scoured video sharing sites YouTube and Vimeo looking for footage that represented those examples. They then edited together a compilation, set to the song Live in this City by Toronto musicians Dragonette. (Every video sampled is credited and linked to in the description, and Ms. Smit says they have not had complaints from anyone asking not to be part of it.)
The website asks people to tweet things they love about Toronto, or to even allow the campaign access to their Twitter accounts to send out messages more widely. It also tracks which hashtag is winning, in terms of the amount of conversation on Twitter: #RobFord or #MoreThanFord. It’s an imperfect measure of course, since many of the people talking about Ford are not on Twitter, or even on Twitter are using different hashtags such as #TOpoli or no hashtags at all. But it’s not meant to be scientific: the message of the campaign is about starting a new conversation, Ms. Smit said.
Not an exciting video, being a montage and all, but I feel their pain. I live in Ottawa. Being branded by bad politics is nothing new to me.
