British moms outraged by “Career women make bad mothers” billboards
How do you think people in San Francisco would respond if giant advertisements reading “Career women make bad mothers” were plastered on the sides of buses?
Beta Agency This actually happened in London last week when a campaign was launched to prove the effectiveness of outdoor advertising. The idea was to show that you can grab people’s attention and that certainly happened.
The Outdoor Advertising Association (OAA) had planned to run the posters on the sides of buses and buildings for 14 days, but the ads came down early after hundreds of moms on the Mumsnet Web site banded together and expressed their outrage in forums.
“I saw this ad on the side of a building last night and just stood there looking at it with my jaw dropped,” one mom wrote. “It doesn’t show that outdoor advertising works, it just shows that controversial advertising works.”
“The one on the side of a building today felt like a kick in the stomach,” wrote another mom.
The Beta agency designed the posters for the OAA, and the strategy head, Sharon Johnson, said they were intended to spark discussion and did not represent the opinion of the agency. But the agency opted to remove the posters rather than continue to offend people with them. On the Beta blog, the agency’s founders, Garry Lace and Robert Campbell, wrote:
Robert and I would like to apologise to anyone we’ve offended with one of the posters we created for the OAA.
The reason we’ve waited until now to apologise is that the strength and nature of the reaction to the poster, specifically on mumsnet, shocked us. At first we were not sure what to do.
It had not been our intention to cause such offence, nor to attract such abuse.
Our intention was to provoke discussion. We believed that both the poster and the content of the Britainthinks website reflected this. We accept we got this wrong.
Do you think what the OAA did was wrong?
Posted By: Amy Graff (Email, Twitter, Facebook) | January 11 2010 at 09:36 AM
Listed Under: Media
“This actually happened in London last week when a campaign was launched to prove the effectiveness of outdoor advertising. The idea was to show that you can grab people’s attention and that certainly happened.”
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfmoms/detail?entry_id=54997&tsp=1##ixzz0cPpDVDUO
My opinion on this one is this – plaster any controversial topic on a bus in a large metro area and it will “spark discussion.” The discussion will only prove how controversial the topic is not how effective ads on buses are.
Am I wrong here? What do you think?
In social media marketing we seek to develop strategies that will reach the right audiences…
Meta recently published a guide to explain video distribution on Facebook, in which they share…
Hi friends, With the seemingly never-ending series of awful events and news, it’s been hard…
Study Associates Changes In Facebook’s Algorithm With Amplified Local Republican Parties’ Posts [skip to the…
This week I’m diving into some unique topics that we need to talk about more: …
What the heck happened this week? Besides the Supreme Court writing, “that the right to…