Call me a simpleton but I believe laughter can save the world. Give me some time and I can dig up scientific studies that show that laughter can help you live longer. Laughter is a universal language. It breaks the tension, the tedium, even the tears of sorrow. It sounds morbid but I have enjoyed some of my most life-affirming laughs at a funeral when a particular recollection brought back joyful memories of a deceased loved one. So it should be no surprise that Marketing for Good encourages marketers to make people laugh. But is it alright for marketers to make some people laugh at something others take extremely seriously?
VW and GM decided recently that it wasn’t okay after coming under fire for their ads that contained contemplations of suicide. These withdrawals made headlines including last Friday’s USA Today. Never one to shy away from an issue, I offered some thoughts to USA Today and they ran as follows:
Yet, when marketers back down, it creates a “very dangerous” environment for the ad industry, says Drew Neisser, CEO of the Renegade Marketing Group. “The recent withdrawals will embolden every interest group to push their agenda and complain about any ad that doesn’t jibe with their mission,” he says. “To create ads that offend no one is a fruitless endeavor,” Neisser says. “To cut through, there must be an element of surprise … that someone, somewhere, might not like.”
As I’ve noted before in this blog, everything is funny unless it happens to you. Sure enough, I got an email from a person who saw my comments in USA Today expressing her concerns over the insensitivity of my comments:
As a marketing professional and someone who has lost a loved one to suicide, I just wanted to express my concerns over your statement in the recent USA Today article on the ads that VW and GM pulled because of their depiction of suicidal acts. One of the most painful and disappointing aspects of our society is that suicide is used as a form of humor. It is atrocious that ad agencies develop and their clients then buy concepts that portray suicide as a way to create a shock factor or humor in their ads. I agree with you that every interest group out there should not have a say in what does and does not make it into advertising, however I do not believe that these particular groups can be seen purely as “interest groups†per se. If a commercial depicted someone dying of cancer or in a car crash to sell products or get a rise out of consumers, there would be public outrage. Suicide is a just as relevant and serious a public health issue as any other disease or cause of death, and I hope that people in the advertising and entertainment industries will eventually recognize it as such. That is the only agenda pushing that the two organizations were doing, and I applaud them…I wish you would too.
I wrote back to this individual and included the following thoughts:
Thank you very much for your note. I understand your point-of-view and can assure you that we have no plans to produce any commercials that go anywhere near the subject of suicide. That said, I have no doubt that we will produce some ads that someone somewhere will complain about it and as a marketer I want to be able to have that right. For example, we could work on a campaign promoting condoms which the entire Catholic church could find morally offensive. Suicide is an important and personal issue to you. Condom usage may seem like a ridiculous parallel and perhaps it is. The point is that I wasn’t really talking about suicide depiction specifically–I was simply advocating free speech and the right to face the consequences of alienating one perspective or another.
On a side note, I can’t help but wonder why suicide is used to so often as a form of humor in our society. There must be a reason because it has been going on for a really long time. Kids do it an early age like dragging a finger across their neck when they get a hard test. I overhear my kids saying things like “if she says that one more time, I’m going to kill myself” all the time. Perhaps it is this prevalence that inspires advertisers to think it is okay to talk about it.
So, Marketing for Good struggles forward, aspiring to make life better for some without making it worse for others. Clearly, this is going to be a lot tougher than I thought.