Scam ads - the Mr Hyde to our Dr Jekyll.

While Ogilvy in India have already apologized for the Kurl-On poster featuring Taliban assassination attempt survivor Malala "bouncing back" to sell mattresses, we can expect more like this as we're officially in the international ad award-season now. Scam ads winning awards in Cannes is a tradition. Bonus points if they have Hitler in them and the Indian agency doesn't have the client, or if there's a hint of pedophilia, or if the creators of the ad have a track record of shocking scam ad wins like the 9/11 WWF ad. You get the picture. Campaigns for Ford with Silvio Berlusconi and his bound and gagged girlfriends in the trunk are uploaded to advertising archives, as if they ran, and soon award shows are awarding the "real" ads. How anyone can think such unacceptable images can be used as a selling tool is quite surprising, meanwhile real ads have every rough edge polished down so hard the main ideas eventually goes missing as the 30 second of sell strives to become the 30 second of politically correct.
But what's the story from the other side? Matthew Charlton is the CEO of Brothers and Sisters and founder of BETC in London shares a story at the Drum: Scam ads and the slippery slope to being a total idiot.

I had personal experience of this running PlayStation years ago. Some gold hungry morons from our group in a far-flung place decided to create a suite of ads comping in images of fairgrounds into real shots of the gas chambers in Auschwitz – and then hijack poor PlayStation and put its name on it. They ran in a single coffee shop, once, and then they entered them into an awards show. Unsurprisingly, the chairman of the jury from Israel took massive exception to them. The implication of these ads were a potential global horror show for all if us – agency and client.
In the end we managed to sort it all out after about four weeks of absolute hell, with client and a journalist who wanted to expose it all as a real campaign, which it never ever was. And PlayStation was incredibly supportive of us, as was Tim Lindsay, my then boss, who fought like hell with me to get justice in the company to the people who did it.
But people get put at risk... jobs, losing accounts. I was under so much stress thinking that it would blow up into an international incident that I thought, on a few occasions, I was having a heart attack. Myself and lots of really decent people were dragged through hell by the total lack of sense and humanity shown by a few gold hungry idiots who placed the chance to win a little trinket over six million people being murdered. I still shiver at the thought.