Ferial Haffajee
‘It’s difficult getting the message through by committee,” says Dominic Ntsele, managing director of ad agency Young & Rubicam.
Last year, Ntsele headed a creative team working to highlight the endemic levels of child abuse, rape and battery in the country, ahead of the Men’s March in November, through a high-profile media campaign.
The statistics (a woman is killed every six days by her spouse; a rape occurs every 36 seconds) gave him and his team sleepless nights. Thus the ads they designed were meant to shock as they had been shocked by the statistics, which so often remain masked in the mainstream media.
Yet intervention by the women’s movement and those who work in the field of child abuse — “the committee” — meant that the most shocking of the adverts they penned didn’t see the light of day. That’s quite normal in the course of what Ntsele calls “cracking a campaign”, and he feels the message “may have been toned down a little; but it definitely wasn’t lost”.
So which ads didn’t make it? Images of nudity as well as those featuring badly beaten women were vetoed. The blow-up doll ad pictured here finally got into the Pretoria News (and into that newspaper alone), but not before much debate by committee. “These people work with children who are abused and this ad just touched a chord,” says Ntsele.
The ad was one of a series of stark black- and-white contrasts which included a woman and a punch-bag, a child and a soccer ball. Each contained the same text: “Tragically, some men can’t tell them apart.”
The Young & Rubicam team had initially coined the phrase “Tragically, some men are so sick they can’t tell them apart,” but activists thought the words “so sick” conveyed the wrong image. They also objected to the photograph of a black, slim, naked woman next to a punch-bag; so she was lightened, fattened and dressed before getting into print.
“We had to put this campaign together in one and a half weeks and it was one of the most difficult processes ever,” says Ntsele, who will definitely do it again, despite the low levels of tolerance for freedom of expression and high doses of political correctness he encountered.
He says: “These ads were not shock for shock’s sake, like the Benetton ads.” Instead they were meant to raise consciousness and as a call to action. South Africa lags behind on such “issues advertising”, believes Ntsele, who would like to see similar campaigns to highlight social issues like Aids and poverty.