If the shoe fits in your mouth, wear it

Every now and then an ad comes along that offends people, and there’s an outcry and outraged calls to 702 and threatening comments on some company’s Facebook page, and the ad is withdrawn, everyone says sorry, and the agency gets blamed. It happened with the spoof sell-your-organs pamphlet campaign for a local horror movie. Its tastelessness was perfectly appropriate for its target market, so as a publicity stunt it made sense. This ad for Shoe City, which ran in You, Huisgenoot and Drum in the last week of May, not so much.

This week that ad offended this industry commentator, which prompted this show on 702. At the same time, visitors to Shoe City’s Facebook page were using it as a convenient opportunity to express their outrage, which prompted this grovelling apology. Who knows exactly how the concept managed to travel from sketchpad (where it should have stayed) to the illustrious pages of You, Drum and Huisgenoot. Perhaps they wanted to win a Loerie and ended up setting the cat among the pigeons. (Sorry. I know. I couldn’t resist.) Incidentally, the editor of You apologised for causing offence, a mildly amusing notion coming as it does from a publication that happily runs headlines reading “He may only have 18 months”. But maybe I’m just a cynic.

Some ads are meant to be offensive. Brands like Nando’s have a long and proud history of pissing off the public, so they can get away with this sort of thing. Shoe City has never done anything to indicate that it wants to be another purveyor of peri-peri chicken so one can only conclude that this was a bad ad, plain and simple. Anyone with functioning synapses could have seen how it might be misinterpreted — that the shoes were a reward for running over the cat rather than retail therapy — and how linking pets being run over to a product targeting women in LSM 7-8 might not be a very good idea, as consumer insights go. The same sentiment could have been expressed so much more cleverly, and without the gratuitous use of a comma in the blurb for the shoe costing R349. (Why has the proofreader become an endangered species? There are two of them at the agency where I work. They sit with the door closed and peer at layouts through magnifying glasses all day.)

Granted, many people found the ad funny and couldn’t see what the fuss was about. “Angry anti-ShoeCity activists will now target Angry Birds” tweeted @mispr1nt. @AmandaSevasti argued: “The Shoe City ad is really lame. It’s probably more guilty of advertising cruelty than animal cruelty.” @dreamfoundry had nothing but contempt for the offended: “Perspective n. A property lacking in all the hysterical yuppies whining like pansy little bitches about the Shoe City advert.” Perhaps the funniest — unintentionally so — was the note from Shoe City in the US assuring the public that it had no affiliation with the Shoe City in South Africa. These days, every scandal is global.

I was going to delve into why animal cruelty is such a raw nerve for a particular demographic — and why it’s madness to use it in anything but an ad for the SPCA — but so complex and thorny an issue requires a blog of its own. Suffice to say that many of the most forceful comments on the Facebook page were from an organisation campaigning against a bizarre and revolting fetish called crush, in which women wearing stiletto heels stomp on cute, furry animals. Crush was banned by the Obama government last year, and I do have to say that now that I know about this practice, seeing stiletto heels juxtaposed with references to running over animals is ever so slightly stomach-churning. I never was a Shoe City customer (I’ve always thought them rather cheap and nasty); now, I most definitely never will be.

Offensive ads are fascinating because they’re such reliable indicators of society’s raw nerves. Campaigns that upset people are the multimedia antibodies of public discourse, indicating as they do at the presence of a persistent malaise. Recent ad scandals mostly revolve around race, like this one for Dove and this one for Cadbury, which compared milk chocolate to Naomi Campbell. In most cases the offensiveness is unintentional, and the result of the inability of copywriters, art directors, creative directors, account executives, business unit heads, brand managers and executive vice-presidents of marketing to notice what is in retrospect perhaps fairly obvious.

In an attempt to placate the offended, Shoe City and You have donated R25 000 between them to the Animal Anti-Cruelty League. The response has been almost textbook standard (apologise, remove the ad, offer redress, engage with the angry rather than retreating into monastic corporate silence). Entertaining as all of this is, I do hope that next time neither of them will be so stupid. Ads like this appear because the people involved in the process of producing them are unable to see anything from more than one angle. If concerns are raised, the people raising them are usually dismissed as humourless or paranoid or both. In an age where a Facebook page makes it easy for consumers to make the life of a marketer very hard indeed, maybe somebody needs to pay more attention.