WWF Walks Back Its Denial on 9/11 Ad
It Gets Worse: Video of 100 Planes Hitting the Towers

Oh, they originally claimed the ad was utterly unauthorized. Just some crazy kids in the copy room smokin' the wacky tabackie and gettin' all kinds of mischievous shenanigans.

Now comes a bit more of that sweet, sweet nuance.

Sergio Valente, president of DDB Brasil, said the ad was presented to the WWF in Brazil in December 2008 and approved; it then ran once in a small local paper.

"When I saw it, I said stop running that ad," Mr. Valente said.

Running an ad once is often a tactic to make it awards-show eligible, and "Tsunami" somehow ended up among a bunch of the agency's submissions to this year's One Show in New York...

After the WWF appeared to initially deny approving the ad, DDB Brasil and the WWF hammered out a statement posted in Portuguese on both groups' Brazilian websites Wednesday afternoon apologizing for the ad and attributing it to "the inexperience of some professionals on both sides, and not bad faith or disrespect toward American suffering."

Run an edgy (oooh!) ad once, get the buzz and the rewards, then claim that no one affiliated with your organization had anything at all to do with it.

Pretty tired of this stupid dance. An ad agency does not release confidential work-product of its client without someone somewhere signing off on it.

Video: I saw a reference to a "viral video" in the above article and didn't know what it referred to -- all I saw was a picture.

Here's the video:

The ad agency claims it has nothing at all to do with this video and doesn't know who on earth made it. But an insider tells me that the visual effects here are pretty pricey, and this is not something someone knocks out for his own pleasure or as a goof.

That said, the provenance of this is in dispute. I kinda think this ad agency obviously did it and is lying about it, but I can't prove it.

Mother Earth

You will abandon the lands you have illegally occupied at once or I will begin killing 100 hostages per day.

This is your last warning.

I don't know about you but that makes me want to napalm the rainforests.

posted by Ace at 06:53 PM

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