2008: Anti-CNN vs. Advertising Greed
July 6, 2008 | Category: China, Internet censorship, Media, Olympics, politics, 荒诞
Surveying the statistics for this blog earlier today, I noticed a strange surge of visits to a post I’d done way back in January, on the crippling expectations being placed on China’s athletes in the run-up to the Games. The focus of the post had been Adidas’ 2008 Games “Impossible is Nothing” campaign, with its images of Chinese Olympic athletes riding to glory literally on the backs of the Chinese masses. Further investigation revealed new traffic was all being directed to the post from a single source: Anti-CNN.com, the website founded in aftermath of the Lhasa riots last March to chronicle evidence (both real and imagined) of anti-China bias in Western media.
It’s happened at last, I thought. Well, then, let it come.
I was relieved (and also, I will admit, a little disappointed) to discover I had nothing to fear. There were no new entries in the comments section. No jingoistic outbursts accusing me of hating China. No obscenities leveled at my family. No response whatsoever. Visiting the page that linked to my blog, I was surprised to discover all of the vitriol had instead been bestowed on TBWA, the group that had dreamed up the Adidas campaign.
What landed TBWA on Anti-CNN’s shit list is not the Adidas campaign, which appears to have thrilled most Chinese people, but its contributions to a separate 2008 Games PR blitz being undertaken by Amnesty International.
As one might expect, the Amnesty International ads aim to portray the Beijing Olympics as a travesty for human rights. The organization has taken a variety of approaches in service of this goal, including one ad that replaces the candle in its logo with an Olympic torch, but most of the series uses the Olympic events themselves to highlight the various ways in which Chinese authorities mistreat Chinese prisoners. There appear to be five of these—boxing, shooting, swimming, weight lifting and archery—with TBWA responsible for the last three (Slovakia’s WUW Saatchi and Saatchi did the others).
Like the Adidas ads, TBWA’s work for Amnesty International is striking, with tremendous attention to detail. In the swimming ad, a prisoner lies shirtless and prostrate between the starting blocks, grimacing as one of the two Chinese policeman straddling him lifts his head out of the pool. Likewise, in the archery ad (see above), a Chinese policeman is shown strolling away with a smile on his face, having strapped a prisoner to the front of a target——the poor man’s fate made clear by another blood-stained target lying on the ground opposite a previously dispatched victim, barely visible in the bottom corner of the frame. Each ad is rendered in gritty, washed-out blues and grays with a message proclaiming, “After the Olympic Games, the Fight for Human Rights Must Go On.” The series earned TBWA a 2008 Cannes Press Lions bronze medal.
The ads attracted the attention on the popular Chinese Internet forum Tianya not long after the Cannes Lions awards were announced, and from there to Anti-CNN, where it quickly amassed six pages’ worth of comments. Predictably, the response in these venues has been less than enthusiastic.
A significant part of the Anti-CNNers’ anger over the ads seems to stem from the fact they were produced out of New York-based TBWA’s French offices. Thanks to the disastrous Paris leg of the Olympic torch relay earlier this year, Chinese nationalists now seethe with hatred for anything having to do with France. Hence, Anti-CNN, Tianya and other Chinese discussion sites are now rife with “fuck TBWA, fuck France”-type commentary.
But not all of the criticism has been unhinged.
“One company, two completely different ways of acting,” one poster wrote on Anti-CNN’s discussion board. “If a company doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong, is willing to make money no matter where it comes from, then it shouldn’t be allowed to make a cent here.”
For all its ignominy as a symbol of frothing-at-the-mouth Chinese nationalism, Anti-CNN doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable. It’s basic position on CNN, after all, is one many people have taken at one point or another, regardless of nationality. And in the case of TBWA, at least a few users of the site make valid points, regardless of where one stands on the Olympics human rights issue.
As far as I can tell, no one at TBWA has been publicly forced to explain how the company justifies gorging itself on rah-rah Olympic sentiment one moment only to vomit it all back up the next. How does the company account for itself? Is the Amnesty campaign an effort to balance the corporate karma ledger? Was there some breakdown in communication between the French and Chinese offices?
With a slogan like “Disruptive Ideas Expressed Through Media Arts,” it seems more likely the company is simply trying to milk a controversial event for all its worth——in which case, they deserve whatever abuse they get, whether from within China or anywhere else.
Tags: advertising, anti-CNN, human rights, nationalism
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About the Author
Josh Chin is a freelance journalist based in Beijing. He also once worked as a sous chef in a French restaurant in San Francisco. Neither job has been good for his health.Photos
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[...] appears the graphic Olympics-themed Amnesty International ads I mentioned in my previous post have started to attract attention outside the Anti-CNN circle. The controversy turns out not to be [...]
[...] contrived to run an ad critical of China’s human rights purportedly for Amnesty France. The furor generated in China by the latter ads, possibly to the horror of the unsuspecting TBWA China team [...]