You may have seen this on other blogs in the last day or so, a print ad apparently for the WWF out of Brazil. It is beyond tasteless. I wasn’t going to comment on it, but then our tipline made it clear that a video spot was also produced.
The caption in the upper right reads: “The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it.” The ad first starting becoming well known when it won the best of 2009 award at www.oneclub.org, which apparently promotes excellence in advertising. (UPDATE: it appears the ad award has been removed from this website but here is a screencap.)
But World Wildlife Fund is rejecting the ad, saying it was released without authorization by the Brazilian Ad agency DDB Brazil (www.ddb.com).
WWF condemned it, saying it was “categorically not solicited nor endorsed” by the organization. Looking at their main website though, http://www.panda.org/ you’d never know they are condemning this ad. The other WWF website does mention it here. Now according to Adfreak, they are accepting “joint blame” for the print ad.
But given the existence of this video, it appears they approved at least a production budget. The video is professionally done with top of the line CGI. It’s not some “rogue” that did this on a shoestring budget.
The video spot showing 2 planes flying into the twin towers, followed by even more, is probably the most tasteless and stupid environmental advertisement I’ve ever seen. If the goal was to shock people, it worked. But I doubt the shock effect is positive for WWF. What it does is piss people off.
Watch the video and see what I mean.
UPDATE: it appears DDB/WWF has made a DMCA complaint with YouTube. I expect DeSmog Blog’s Kevin Grandia and Climate Progress’ Joe Romm to express shock and outrage any minute now.
Alternate source to the video can be found here. http://creativity-online.com/work/wwf-tsunami-%28tvc%29/17193
In my opinion, it boggles the mind that anyone or any organization could be so dense as to not predict the public reaction to such a print ad, much less a video. I don’t care how noble you think your cause is, this hijacking of an American tragedy for earth awareness, is not only callous and insulting to the thousands of families affected by this tragedy, but it is probably the single most disgusting and stupid application of eco advertising I’ve ever witnessed.
The WWF initial “denial” of association with this ad just isn’t credible and is falling apart. Have you no shame?
From Hot Air:
WWF is finally admitting that they did play some role in approving the print spot, issuing a joint statement with the ad agency, DDB, that “the inexperience of some professionals on both sides” is to blame. And yet:
Sergio Valente, president of DDB Brasil, said the ad was presented to the WWF in Brazil in December 2008 and approved; it then ran once in a small local paper.
“When I saw it, I said, ‘Stop running that ad,’” Mr. Valente said…
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.
Really? So some wily amateur video producer out there happened to stumble across a print ad that only ran once in South America and was so taken with it that he churned out a slick animated version on his own dime? Humor me for a moment and assume that this is, in fact, the handiwork of DDB. If so, exactly how many “inexperienced professionals” contributed to — and approved — the spot?
This spot comes from an ad agency employed by the same people that say “We Need a New Global Climate Deal“. Good luck with that, with this revelation, you’ve just committed global stupicide.
h/t to WUWT reader Corey
Steve Huntwork (22:38:50) :
Real and Firefox both have add-ons that download YouTube videos to your computer.
BTW, according to a comment above this video was on Fox News channel/ Hannity tonight. So the horse is out of the barn.
Remember, these people want fewer humans. Human life has no value. “By any means necessary”, “humans are a cancer on this planet” I believe is what was said. Also, it is a great distraction (albeit a very base one), from the “official” climate press release. Freak people out with a shockingly stupid video, and no one will even notice that another ace was slipped into the hand. I hope they remember what happened to the cowboy who was caught cheatin’ at the card table, ……. just sayin’, …..
Analogy of an “accident”:
Didn’t look/didn’t think/didn’t ask.
Didn’t look both ways before assuming “wow, this will really knock ’em over”.
Didn’t think that it could possibly be highly offensive.
Didn’t ask “Should we be doing this?”.
After the last election where trumped up associations got dumped, some people didn’t get the message. They’ll hear it now.
Steve Huntwork (22:38:50) :
“How can you capture this video?”
It’s been captured, but you can do it as well by using a Firefox plugin like this:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13990
and downloading it from here:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1mFoTQNivc]
Steve Huntwork (22:38:50) :
How can you capture this video?
It will not be around in a few hours and nobody will know what you are talking about.
In Firefox, the “Download Helper” plug-in can snag and reformat it to AVI. (or save it in it’s native FLV)
Question about the Vid. It infers that the Tsunami deaths could have been prevented due to “global awareness?”
umm… How?
Cont..
Right click on the video, select Watch On YouTube from the menu, which should open a new window/tab with the YouTube video . If you have the Firefox plugin installed “FLV MP4” links will appear at the bottom right of the video. By clicking on them you can download the video in either of those formats. Note that you must have the Mozilla Firefox browser installed for this to work.
crosspatch (22:19:27) :
“An Inconvenient Truth shown at a public school?”
Heh, yeah, it was interesting the way it was broached to the parents, too. She sent home a sheet with my daughter that said from time to time the class might have some free time or they may earn a treat through their efforts and she asked permission to show the kids a movie. She listed several candidate movies and offered parents a chance to voice their opinion about whether they find any of the objectionable in any way. They were all things like “little mermaid” and “finding nemo” but in the second column about halfway down was “An Inconvenient Truth”.
~~~~
Want to lay odds most parents never read the second column?
I think that the video has given me a better idea of what the relatives of the Lockerbie bombing victims must have felt when the images of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi’s welcome in Tripoli were shown. Whoever made the video is as dumb as the Scottish Minister of Justice.
It just shows that nothing is sacred to the ecofascists.
It’s another one for the ‘you couldn’t make it up’ file.
But they did.
“The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11.”
Over the course of his rule, so did Saddam Hussein.
I was a pilot who was flying on 9/11. I was stuck away from America for a week, unable to contact my family to say that wasn’t me, because the transatlantic phone lines were totally overloaded.
I am offended most by the “let’s not talk about” attitude of the American media. We had a week of overkill, the same videos running in continuous loop, then the realization that Arab terrorists striking a blow against capitalism wasn’t in the template. So nothing. How long has it been since we’ve seen a rerun of the planes striking the towers? Years and years.
I can only hope this video gets wide distribution, both to remind us of what and who did this evil deed, and also to show how far off base our many “mainstream” non-profits have gone.
Suggesting the tsunami was caused by CO2 is the height of insanity. Things have gone too far.
The story made Canadian national news – (it’s unusual to see the same thing covered there & here) – see time index 2:56 to 5:24 here:
http://watch.ctv.ca/news/ctv-national-news/sept-2/#clip209732
(You’ll have to endure the brief ad they force-feed to get to the clip.)
I am an Australian and that WWF poster offends and angers me greatly….. I can’t imagine how offensive that would be to an American.
The WWF is obscene.
3,000 innocent people deliberately killed? Heck thats fiddlesticks. Why should we respect those lives?
Respect nature, pay your carbon taxes. Stop tsunamis from happening.
Terrorism? Islamofascism? That isn’t a problem.
The real problem is the CO2 you breathe out while you’re alive. See what happened with the boxing day tsunami? Its all because of that pollutant CO2.
Someone should ask them to research the health of the Great Barrier Reed 30,000 years ago. I wonder if it will dawn on them that the entire reef at that time was dead as a doornail and well above sea level.
dang, meant great barrier reef. My fingers are skinny but you can’t tell from my typing. Sheesh.
“J.Hansford (00:25:04) :
I am an Australian and that WWF poster offends and angers me greatly….. I can’t imagine how offensive that would be to an American.
The WWF is obscene.”
I am also an Australian, left leaning, green leaning, and that poster offends and angers me. As it should anyone with half a brain.
I also think that the video is tasteless, and completely stupid on a scientific point of view….If it comes from WWF direction they should publicly apologize if it was broadcasted.
But I’d like to make 2 points before screaming with the wolves:
-if it was leaked…well, it was private document, and, regardless how tasteless it is, you can say or do anything in private. It is freedom of thought, or of expression among a private group at worst. This suffer no exception in my book.
-The quality of the video is no proof it was professionaly done with a significant budget. Nowaday, this kind of document is well within the reach of a single dedicated amateur with the right tools imho, provided that the air view of manhattan can be grabbed somewhere (CGIing this remains difficult, but adding the plane and the explosion effects is not) ….and a lot of such amateurs exists.
Look at fan-made starwars parodies or other homemade scifi flicks available on youtube, if you have time and talent you can do anything photowise, and a lot videowise, with current PCs….
Crosspatch and others:
The UK government ordered An Inconvenient Truth to be shown in all British state schools. One parent took the government to court. The court found that there were nine factual errors in the film, so now it can only be shown if the other side is put to the children too. Mind you, I don’t reckon a teacher reading through a list has as much effect as a slickly-produced film. That’s the state of British education these days.
Stu (00:59:33) :
Sometimes, that is all that you need to say…
Such simple words are important for us Americans to hear.
“I am an Australian and that WWF poster offends and angers me greatly….. I can’t imagine how offensive that would be to an American.”
Thanks for that, Stu. The sensitivity is much appreciated. And I actually consider myself to be “greener” than most but in a different way than most. My grandfather was a farmer but he was a different kind of farmer than many of our neighbors. Our neighbors were “inheritance farmers”. They did things the way their father did because that is “how things are done”. My grandfather had a degree in agriculture back in the 1920’s when very few farmers were college educated. He taught me that you can not simply keep taking from the land. He taught me that there is a cycle and organic material must be put back if the land is to be sustainable. If you only add chemicals, the soil eventually turns to sand and doesn’t support a crop in drought. His land was the best in the county during periods of dry weather. We rotated animals across the fields. He also had a commercial slaughter house. Bones were saved and ground and the meal spread on the land. The blood was saved and spread on the ground. The awful was cooked, mixed with grain, fed to animals that rotated between the fields. I was taught sustainable agriculture from the time I was old enough to talk. Or better, I was taught that simply taking was unsustainable. The earth is like a bank account, you can withdraw for a time but if you continue without making any deposits, it becomes depleted and there is nothing left.
My grandfather did many studies for the Department of Agriculture during World War II to help increase food production. He was called upon to teach new methods to the local farmers. My father was an engineering type who maintained high performance supersonic jet aircraft in the early 1960’s. My uncle who is more of an older brother to me got his PhD in agriculture and worked toward making safer ways of ridding our food supply of pests. There is a long history of respect for science and at the same time respect for the earth in my heritage.
A saying that has come through the generations of my family is “mother nature bats last” which might not have the same meaning for an Aussie as for a Yank as it refers to baseball. The gist of it is that no matter what you do, it can all be undone in the bottom of the ninth inning when Mother Nature does something completely unexpected.
I believe many of us here have great love and respect for this earth. But we are seeing people use other people’s love and respect to their advantage through a lack of knowledge on the part of the masses. People who sincerely mean nothing but the best for their neighbors and their community are being taken advantage of by appealing to their desire to maintain this planet and stoking fear in them for no real reason. And it should be criminal.
Have we come to this? Obviously we have.
WWF – doesn’t that stand for “Waiting for the Wheels to Fall off”?
Dang, meant offal, not awful.
It’s 10am in the UK and the video has been pulled. YouTube says it has pulled the video due to a copyright claim by DDB, so it will be interesting to see how they maintain their claim that they didn’t produce it…
Seems to me the ad idea subtext is that Americans don’t care about the world–they’re too selfish–and so we’ll show them what it means in terms of something that they do care about… and we know how they do drone on about 911….
OK, so here’s the same ad idea, adapted throughout the world:
The tsunami killed X times more woman and children than did the Gaza bombings. (Broadcast in Palestine)
The tsunami killed X times more people than the police did in the Soweto uprisings. (Broadcast in South Africa)
The tsunami killed X times more people than the British army did in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. (Broadcast in India)
and so on with the Balkan Massacre, etc.
The ad is a profoundly stupid idea. It serves nothing and nobody, least of all the environment.