A series of outdoor ads are circulating on China’s Internet forums and may have the potential to cause a new round of anti-Western prejudice and conspiracy theories. Is the “Western advertising industry” is going to follow the “Western media” to become the next target of protest and boycott? (See this post (Chinese) on Anti-CNN.com for example, it’s titled ‘ Amnesty International commissions multinational company to concoct advertisements about China mistreating prisoners’.
The ads are allegedly designed by TBWA’s Paris offices for Amnesty International. The slogan in the ads is “After the Olympic Games, the fight for human rights must go on.”
It is said that this series won a bronze medal in this year’s Cannes Advertising Festival, but your correspondent could not confirm this from the Internet.
Interestingly, TBWA is also the ad agency behind another series of Olympic-themed ads of a different type for Adidas. You can see them on Virtual China. They are unlikely to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.
Update (by Jeremy Goldkorn):
Some commenters are questioning the source of these advertisements. A site called Ads of the World has a web page about the series of ads: Amnesty – Swimming. The page identifies the client as Amnesty International, and states:
Advertising Agency: TBWA\Paris, France
And the plot gets thicker: An anonymous commenter to this Danwei post (see comments below) announces:
Amnesty International would like to make clear that it was not involved in the dissemination of a series of images that have been circulating on the web in relation to the Beijing Olympics. Amnesty International’s global website address is www.amnesty.org
- International Herald Leader via QQ (Chinese): Amnesty fabricated ads accusing China of prisoner abuse
- Anti-CNN.com (Chinese): Amnesty International uses multinational ad agency to concoct prisoner abuse ads