Child Abuse on Gruen tomorrow night
THE GRUEN TRANSFER
WEDNESDAY APRIL 15 AT 9PM ON ABC1
Wil Anderson, Todd Sampson, Russel Howcroft
joined by Dan Gregory and Gruen newcomer Carolyn Miller
How do you sell?
Weight Loss Products: Did Jenny Craig hitpay dirt when they signed Magda Szubanski? Smart PR or cash forcomment? And why are there hardly ever fat people in weight loss ads?
Ad of the Week
ChildAbuse: The panel discuss the controversial Australiann commercial aboutincest. It’s a confronting subject and an intense conversation.
The Pitch
Canour duelling ad agencies come up with a campaign to launch a charityfor all those super-rich CEOs now facing smaller payouts thanks to theGlobal Financial Crisis. This week something different – two digitalagencies, which specialize in online campaigns, are in competition: Soap Creative, Sydney versus Sputnik Agency, Melbourne.
34 Comments
We been through this before……alot of people really like this campaign, alot of people really don’t. To quote Mr Bernbach, ‘if you’re advertising goes unnoticed ,everything else is academic’ . People who’d never heard of ASCA, now do.
Brilliantly said. I’m now aware of ASCA.
No-one ‘really likes it’ except the anachronisms over at WTBWA. People notice earthquakes, pimples, hairy moles, doesn’t mean they’re good.
1.09
I’m rather fond of pimples and hairy moles, so keep your deformaphobia to yourself.
12:30, I’m sure Mr Bernbach knew the difference between your and you’re.
He was, after all, a writer.
Love it or hate it….It works.
1.09. Chill out man.
I’d never heard of ASCA. Now I’ve have.
I’d never heard of you. And I still haven’t.
As Bill Bernbach also once said “get a life dip shit”
Can you please explain to us laypeople how it works 2:24?
What’s the call to action? Are we supposed to donate or is it an awareness message. If so, what are we being made aware of; the fact that kids get abused or ASCA?
If so, who is the target audience? People who don’t know that kids get abused or that ASCA exists, or people who have been abused yet don’t know that ASCA exists?
And if it is the latter, why is the communication making light of abuse, then saying ‘if only it was this easy to get over abuse’, before telling telling us of the existence of something that might be able to help us, if indeed he have previously been abused, or possibly feel like donating to a cause to help such people?
Can you see how we can get confused? Especially when the set-up to the punchline has already alienated over 50% of the audience.
Getting attention for attentions sake isn’t necessarily a good thing. If I walked around town nude I’m pretty sure I’d get plenty. And I sincerely doubt any of it would be good. But by this campaign’s rationale, as long as my objective was for people to become aware that I had all the appendages that come with being a guy, it would have been a huge success.
Bollocks.
What’s the Gruen Transfer?
The target of the ads is neither ‘people who don’t know kids get abused’ nor ‘people who have been abused’.
There are many other campaigns aimed at those people.
It is, fairly obviously I would have thought, targeting people who aren’t aware that the effects of child abuse last a lifetime. It’s a depressingly high number and does include those who have been abused but think they’ve ‘gotten over it’ or simply repressed it.
Read the ASCA website.
And I wouldn’t say the ads are making light of abuse. Just the opposite.
4.08 this is a blog for creatives.
Funny how it’s a blog for creatives when someone posts a good argument.
8:21 no, it’s a blog for a certain agency that just doesn’t know when to stop choking that chicken.
Which Juniors getting abused on the show? Can you show child abuse on the ABC?
7:31 – you’ll love my new ad for the RSPCA
We open on shots of people beating up dogs with sticks.
Super: You shouldn’t beat up dogs with sticks.
Logo: The RSPCA
See 7:31, it’s not about beating up dogs with sticks. It’s about telling people that beating up dogs with sticks it bad. Get it?
8.35AM
That’s exactly what most charity ads are like.
The ASCA is the complete opposite and that’s why it works.
“The ASCA is the complete opposite and that’s why it works.”
Fabulous rationale 9:48. Did you learn those skills at “I Know You Are But What am I? College”?
Convince me. I need convincing. And so far, you’re not doing a great job.
I find child abuse very offensive. I find the general lack of discussion about the consequences of it in adult hood just as offensive. So yes, it seems to make sense to me I find these ads extremely offensive. And I’m glad they do.
I think they draw a very large line in the sand for what isn’t acceptable behaviour in our society. So, well done as hard a pill it is to swallow.
Empathetic images of suffering adults wouldn’t cut it.
I went to the Gruen Show and saw it being hammered,but funnily enough i sat there thinking ‘i still like it…..it comes at the problem in a new way,tells me a fact i didn’t know about the number of Adult survivors, then tells me where to go to help ,donate or find out more…..their website’. Its becoming popular and easy to jump on the ‘i don’t like it either’ bandwagon, but i suspect there are an awful lot of people ,who like me , will continue to give it the thumbs up.
And before you have a go at me,repect the fact that i’m entitled to my opinion as well as you are …..and that, guess what, we don’t have to agree.
@ 1.09 it doesn’t mean they are good, but it does mean they are interesting, and interesting is all I care about. I can’t wait to see some of your dull uninteresting ads.
All these rejoinders feel agency-posted. Hi Gaz and Dodsy.
Is there any truth in the rumour that Todd Sampson who leads the rage tonight, used to head up the ASCA account at burnetts before they moved to whybins ?
Why Will Anderson?
Why?
‘Scathing’ is the word I believe. And I must agree. This work is rubbish of the first order.
Love it or hate it…It works.
Agree 100% with the Gruen panel about this ad. It’s just wrong in so many ways. And the argument that because we’re talking about it means it’s a good ad is complete rubbish. I wonder how the Siren Award judges are feeling about awarding this crapolathe the winning radio campaign the other week.
Appalling creative work by the agency involved.
So….the Gruen Show is being serious….is that because they want to be taken seriously…..what a joke…. are their ratings that bad?
You’rei right, it’s ” rubbish work”
….Why then did B&T it make their ‘Pick of the week’? Why has the work….TV,Radio and print ….been recogonised by Bestadsontv ? Why have seriously good journolists got behind the campaign, why? Maybe,just maybe, becuase it confronts the issue in a way that shakes up the the way in which we deal with the problem…..my POV.
it is rubbish. an ad that has the focus on the victim needing to get over it (‘cos it’s the victim’s fault, right?), with or without humour, is in the poorest taste and feels as if it was written about three-quarters the way through last century.
3.40PM
Thanks for the call out. Hi to your anonymous self too.
Naturally I have been tempted. Sorely tempted. But thus far I have refrained from commenting on the merits or otherwise of the campaign in this thread.
I think I expressed my point of view adequately in the very similar thread a few months back when responding to the judge on Best Ads.
That said, I probably should confess to being 1.34PM on the 14th. The deformaphiliac. I just have a thing about pimples and moles. The hairier the better. And I hate to see them dissed.
As for tonight’s Gruen Transfer, I’m not hugely fussed. I think they are wrong, but I would say that wouldn’t I?
I thought the most egregious error was the universal praise for Magda Szubanski as spokeswoman for WeightWatchers. No-one mentioned the likelihood of the Oprah Effect. For those without daytime TV this is when someone loses weight very publicly, then piles it back just as quickly.
Were I advising Weightwatchers, I would not put all my eggs in the basket of someone who is still at risk of scoffing them.
First long copy ad for while Steve?
Ends nicely with a pun too.
80s rock.
Me, I’m getting a little weary of rich ad man Todd playing child of the revolution.
Talking critically about”Capitalists” as if he didn’t know our entire industry is based on capitalism and the free market is too shallow for words.
Of course, come the revolution I’m sure he’ll happily take a job as Minister for Propaganda.
Oh, I forgot – after Earth Hour, he thinks he’s already got the gig.
Thanks 1.15AM. You are correct that it ends on a play on words, although strictly speaking it isn’t a pun. More of a twisted mixed metaphor.
The Gruen panel misunderstood it. The ad is not trying to be funny in any way. I understand if some sexual abuse victims feel the ad is too confronting and too traumatic for them to have to see unexpectedly during their TV viewing, and that is a valid criticism. But to say it mocks incest victims is a complete misunderstanding of the ad. It is not using “sick humour” – the scenario is meant to be shocking and disgusting rather than funny. By presenting an alternate reality where something so horrible is an affectionate anecdote, it is making the point that this is a reality many have to live with that we can easily ignore because it is hidden out of shame and guilt.
It’s also making a point about the normalisation of abuse that victims have to live with, the idea that the perpetrator could make them feel it’s a normal part of life. It exposes how very wrong that is by exaggerating that normalisation to the point that you could joke about it in front of friends and families. By making us feel strongly how wrong this scenario is, it makes us confront the reality of what victims have to live with.
The ad utilises an ad format that we expect to be jokey to pack a punch about how serious an issue this really is. It is very effective. Unfortunately those cues ads use to make us expect humour seem to be so effective that many are mistaking this for an ad that is meant to be humorous.
Todd Sampson annoys me. His moral stances are clumsy, poorly thought-out and lacking real depth. I hesitate to label people ‘politically correct’ because it’s often misused to describe any compassionate, left-leaning person, but to me Sampson genuinely fits this definition. He seems to have an idea of what he thinks is right that is filtered through what how he thinks others will take something, which shows him to be an ad man through and through. He reacts to triggers that suggest something is morally wrong without really considering the full issue. He takes such a strident stance without giving fair weight to the complexities of an issue, and I end up finding his knee-jerk, lightweight moralising offensive.
I find his assessments of ads like this and the anti-obesity prejudice Pitch ad so totally off the mark, I can only conclude the devices used in ads like that are a little beyond him. I’d really like to see him replaced with a panelist who is a more thorough thinker and has a better developed sense of ethics that run deeper than being afraid of what will offend.