Advertising Age published a thoughtful perspective on cultural cluelessness, unintentionally underscoring how bias can come from the offenders and offended alike.
A complaint about your ad is information—it is not a verdict
By Stephen E. Terrell
In the fall of 1994, I put a naked man on a billboard in Fort Lauderdale. He lasted six days.
In fairness, he had already lasted 158 years. He was the young man seated by the sea in a Hippolyte Flandrin painting from 1836 that hangs in the Louvre, where to my knowledge nobody has ever called 3M about it.
The board was for Page & Associates, a Cleveland company that bought life insurance policies from people who were dying, so they could have the money while they were still alive to spend it. In 1994, that mostly meant gay men with AIDS. The copy ran five words: “Terminally ill ... there are options.” Then a phone number. No logo the size of a Buick. No starburst.
I chose the painting because my audience already knew it. For years, a print of it on a gay man’s wall was a signal flag hidden in plain sight. Any other gay man who walked into that home knew exactly what it meant. Everyone else saw a nice museum reproduction. I took the flag off the living room wall and ran it up a billboard. A man driving past did not need a headline to tell him who the board was for. The same ad had been running in gay magazines. Companies like mine were buying so much space there that Ad Age covered it that May. The billboard was that magazine ad with the volume turned up. The University of Miami Business Law Review later recorded it as the first billboard for a company in that business.
The location was not an accident, either. I put my boards in the gayest neighborhoods I could find. This one was aimed across four lanes of highway at the Copa, the biggest gay disco in South Florida. You find out where your audience dances, and you face the board that way.
It also happened to stand directly above a sports bar.
The owner complained. He told the local paper that the message was one thing but the naked man was tasteless. 3M, which owned the board, took it down six days into a 60-day contract.
Today, that is where the story ends. The brand posts a statement. The creative disappears. Somebody junior gets blamed, and everyone is at lunch by noon.
Here is what happened in 1994. The board went back up the next day. Nobody apologized. Nobody painted on a fig leaf. The company’s attorney made a call, and then a 3M representative did something radical. He sat down with the bar owner and explained what the ad was for. According to 3M’s spokesperson at the time, the owner had not fully understood it. Once he did, he agreed to have it back.
One conversation, 24 hours, same naked man.
That bar owner taught me three questions I still ask before anybody touches a campaign.
Who is complaining? The man downstairs was not my audience. My audience was across the highway, in line at the Copa.
Do they understand it? He saw a nude. He did not see men in his own city who were out of money and out of time. Somebody told him, and he changed his mind. People do that more often than a crisis plan assumes.
Is the audience you built it for complaining? Because when they are, you pull it, and you say thank you. I have done that, too. Years later I tested a Betty White radio spot on “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” It delivered 20-30 solid leads every time it aired. Then her fans started calling with one question: “Does Betty know?” I pulled it. The numbers said stay. The audience said go. The audience outranks the numbers.
Treat those two complaints the same way and you will kill your best work and keep running your worst.
Brands spend years and millions asking people to trust them. Then one stranger raises his voice and the brand drops its own work like a hot casserole. The audience notices. If you will not stand behind your ad for 24 hours, why would anyone stand behind your brand for 24 years?
The painting, for the record, is still in the Louvre. Still naked. Still up.
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