The 9/11 WWF Ad That Latin America Says You’re Being Too Sensitive About

DDB Brasil, an advertising agency in Sao Paulo, came up with an an ad that features dozens of airplanes flying into the Twin Towers in New York City with the headline, “The Tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. Our planet is brutally powerful. Respect it.” Then their client, World Wildlife Federation approved the ad. They made a television version and entered both into the Cannes Film Festival and The One Show in New York. But they didn’t want Americans to know about it.

Watch “Tsunami” By DDB Brasil And WWF

Yes, the idea is that the earth is more destructive than a dozen 9/11’s so you should give WWF your money. In advertising this is what they call, “borrowed interest.” When you take something sensational, like an airplane smashing into the Twin Towers, and try to bring it back to your boring product. But nature conservation isn’t even that boring. Either way, it’s a big fail, both creatively and more importantly, politically. And this is the least interesting part of the story.

See, first, the print ad (above) surfaced on the internet. Some blogger found it on The One Show website and posted it on his website where it began to make the rounds. WWF said they’d never heard of it. “When I saw it, I said ‘Stop running it,’” DDB Brasil President Sergio Valente told the press. (Didn’t he used to make really tight jeans?), but he did admit the ad was presented to the WWF in Brazil in December 2008 and that it was approved by them and that it ran once in a small local paper in Sao Paulo.  (This would be to make it eligible to enter into awards shows. A snake-like practice that fills advertising awards books.) WWF and DDB Brasil huddled and came out with a statement written on both their websites, in Portuguese, a language many Americans speak:

After the WWF appeared to initially deny approving the ad, DDB Brasil and the WWF hammered out a statement posted in Portuguese on both groups’ Brazilian websites Wednesday afternoon apologizing for the ad and attributing it to “the inexperience of some professionals on both sides, and not bad faith or disrespect toward American suffering.”

The statement continued, “WWF-Brasil and DDB Brasil reaffirm that the ad never should have been created, approved or run. They deeply regret that this happened, and apologize to everyone who has been offended.”

So, it was the crazy juniors’ faults, huh? But what these fools didn’t count on, (and we have no idea why they didn’t), is that the TV spot they made and, hello, entered into Cannes, would also surface. As you can see, it’s totally effects-driven. (Which is largely why it sucks. The concept is weak.) There’s no way some lone rebel did that on his own, but DDB Brasil and the WWF denied having anything to do with it:

A DDB Brasil spokesperson in Sao Paulo said a video version of the ad being circulated on the internet was not done or authorized by the agency or the client. She said DDB execs first saw the video, which features slightly different copy, on the internet and don’t know who created it.

But what they couldn’t explain was why the spot had been entered in both The One Show and the Cannes Advertising Awards–arguably the most prestigious, certainly the most high-profile– advertising awards show in the world. You don’t enter a spot in Cannes without the top guys knowing about it. At the same time, Creativity, an Ad Age sister site, received a PR package from DDB Brasil featuring the very same freaking ads! (Hi, Left Hand? Meet Mr. Righty.) So, the agency went through another round of denying that they had anything to do with proudly pushing these ads to garner publicity for their agency. But, a Brazilian advertising publication found their entries into Cannes for both the newspaper and magazine and film categories for the ad entitled, “Tsunami.” Do these guys have any idea how the internet works? Here’s a simple rule of thumb guys: What you put in it, people can see. Forever. Everyone finally admitted they were shameless, lying sacks, which probably means they’re in the right business, after all. And now, the only good thing to come out of this, allegedly, is that The One Show is banning fake ads which it defines, amongst other things as having “run once to meet the requirements of a tear sheet.”

Interestingly, the Latin American ad world has reacted by saying that Americans are too touchy and that our advertising sucks. These things are both true, but can you compare an ad that says, “More people die of car wrecks than swine flu,” as one Argentinean chief creative officer did, to an act of deliberate terrorism? And most interestingly, Latin Americans already see that their creative, which is often more edgy and interesting than America’s, will begin to get watered down as their local ads become subject to the tastes of the rest of the globe. And, hello, this phenomenon goes both ways.

Latino Creatives on the WWF Crisis: Bad Ad, Worse PR, Touchy Americans [Ad Age]
One Show President Bans Fake ADs [Media Bistro]