Tuesday, January 29, 2008

AFSP and ads

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention was featured in the USA Today. Check out the article in its entirety here.

Advocacy groups keep advertisers on their toes

The day after last year's Super Bowl, Gebbia arrived at work to find a flood of phone messages and e-mails complaining about a General Motors (GM) ad with a suicidal robot. As executive director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, he figured he'd better go online and check it out.

He didn't like what he saw. He was insulted by the ad — featuring a robot that has a nightmare about losing its assembly-line job — because he thought it turned suicide into a comic punch line.

The next day, Gebbia sent a sharply worded letter to GM demanding that the ad be yanked. A day later, he e-mailed a press release to newspapers. Within three days, GM altered the ending and dropped the original ad from TV and its website.

Talk about power. Gebbia's tiny organization has an ad budget of zero, a workforce of 31 and an annual budget of $9 million. GM has a $3.3 billion U.S. ad budget, a worldwide workforce of 280,000 and net sales in 2006 of $207 billion.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

a girl got this symbol tattooed on the inside of her wrist in honor of her late brother...last night on L.A. Ink
xoxoxox