Shock Advertising

A large portion of our class this past Wednesday was focused on Chapter 6 of "Visual Communication: Images with Messages" and shock advertising.  Benetton is one of the main utilizers of this type of advertising, incorporating controversial ideas into his advertisements.  One such advertisement is of AIDS advocate David Kirby on his deathbed, his father, sister, and niece at his side (shown below).

After being published in Life magazine, the photograph was still largely ignored.  Accordingly, Benetton got permission from Kirby's family to feature the image in an advertisement for one of his stores.  This raised extreme controversy.  Was it right to use this heartbreaking image for something so frivolous as clothing?  Morally, I would like to say "no way," but, in the end, the photograph got the publicity it deserved from this irrelevant usage and Benetton, once again, grew in popularity.  This is the epitome of the saying: “all publicity is good publicity”.  Benetton received the exposure it craved, and earned the label of a rebel, appealing to teenagers.  Calvin Klein also earned this reputation with his sexually precocious portrayal of young boys and over-sexualizing of young girls or women who look like children.  Both names seem to describe how to break taboos and still continue to improve business.

As Newton N. Mino said in "A Vaster Wasteland", children have been "bombarded... [by] commercials disguised as programs and with endless displays of violence and sexual exploitation" for over fifty years (2). With this, another question arises: Is it more moral for a company exaggerate how great a product is (lie) or tell the raw, gruesome truth about an entirely separate entity?  It seems to me that, in the toxic world of advertising, it really doesn't matter which extreme a company chooses to take.  One thing is true: there is no happy medium if a company wants to stand out in a sea of billboards, newspaper ads, and commercials.  If a company wants publicity, it needs to think of a new, iconic way to captivate consumers. As heart wrenching as it is, over-sexualizing objects and people or displaying controversial images may just be the way to go!