"The usually gentle World Wildlife Fund was on the warpath” earlier this month, reported the New York Daily News, “after a tasteless ad exploiting 9/11 appeared online bearing its famous panda logo.” We’ve reprinted part of the story below.
It showed dozens of planes diving at lower Manhattan with the tag line: "The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it."
The ad surfaced - days before the eighth anniversary of the attack - when it won a merit award from The One Club, a nonprofit that promotes "excellence" in advertising.
Just one problem - the WWF says the image was created on specifications by a Brazilian ad agency that were never approved.
"We are just utterly appalled," said WWF spokeswoman Leslie Aun.
"This ad is not something that anyone in our organization would ever have signed off on."
The image was presented by admen from the agency DDB Brasil to WWF officers in Brazil and quickly rejected, Aun said.
"You hear a lot of concepts in meetings. We assumed it was dead and gone. But it appears now that someone submitted it to a competition," she said.
OUR TAKE: What’s troubling is that this kind of story could happen to any organization. What’s to keep someone at an agency from taking the concept for an ad, sharing it with co-wokers and friends, only to have it gain further visibility through any of the new communications tools? Or, what’s to stop someone who has no connection with an organization from creating an “ad” and then posting it – regardless of the fact that the “ad” was never authorized by the organization mentioned in it? That's our take, what's yours?