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.]

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.