More on the Amnesty International Olympics Ads

July 14, 2008 | Category: China

$Amnesty International\'s rejected Olympic Weightlifting Ad$
It 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 the one I identified, i.e., whether the firm that produced the ads could be slammed for gross hypocrisy for having previously produced pro-Olympics ads for Adidas, but instead whether or not Amnesty International is willing to claim them.

As noted on ESWN a few days ago (h/t John Kennedy of Global Voices), Amnesty International’s official website is Amnesty.org while the website listed at the bottom of the ads is Amnesty.com, raising questions about who actually commissioned them. ESWN then dug up the following explanation, from France 24:

A campaign about the Beijing Olympics produced for Amnesty International France was considered so aggressive by its creators that they decided to call off its release.

Advertising agency TBWA\Paris did however seek permission from their client to present the project at the Cannes Lions advertising festival. And it even received a prize. Since then the images, which show Chinese prisoners tortured with the help of Olympics sports equipment, have been circulated on blogs and forums in China, causing outrage in the country.

Further down, France 24 published the following comment from Marie Holzman, a French China specialist and human rights activist:

I was there when they shot the photos for the campaign. The imagery was very provoking and direct. It was designed to blow your mind – if you’re French, not Chinese. But because of advertising, the French understanding has become very sophisticated; this was perhaps a little brutal.

Leaving aside the question of how such blunt images could be said to be aimed at a “sophisticated” audience, the interesting thing for me here is Amnesty’s decision to allow TBWA to enter the ads in the Cannes contest after rejecting them as too aggressive (which we presumably can read to mean counter-productive). Did they honestly think the images wouldn’t get out, wouldn’t end up on some Chinese message board or another, especially given the hyper-sensitivity of certain portions of the Chinese online population these past few months? Even if Amnesty asked TBWA to remove their name from the ads and TBWA simply ignored the request, somebody somewhere appears to have made either a very bad, or a very naive, decision.

This business also raises some interesting questions about the value of arguments for or against Internet content based on the notion of audience. Certainly, people who post audience-specific content to the Internet (or who produce audience-specific content that is then posted to the Internet by other people) are allowed to offer the audience-specific defense when that content is misinterpreted by people for whom it was not intended. But when does that defense fly, and when does it do a big, embarrassing face-plant? In the case of the Amnesty ads, saying they were intended for French people certainly sounds like a case of the later–a little like a pair of giggling Chinese teenagers excusing themselves for joking about the Mandarin-speaking French person’s gigantic nose because they had no idea he would understand.

[NOTE: None of this would appear to apply to the Amnesty Olympics ads produced by Slovakian ad agency WUW Saatchi and Saatchi, which display a legitimate website (www.amnesty.sk) and which, as far as I can tell, still have Amnesty International's stamp of approval.]

Tags: advertising, anti-CNN, human rights

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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.