And today’s great moment in idiotic advertisement award goes to UNICEF Germany. In searching for an ad campaign about education in Africa, someone had the brainstorm that putting blackface from mud on white children’s faces would be just dandy. And this is the organization that is trying to help children in impoverished nations!
The campaign can be found here and the blog Black Women in Europe have the english translations.
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8 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.Well, these ads certainly do catch my attention but they don’t make me want to donate. I’ll be doing as the linked blog suggests and writing a nicely worded letter.
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Germans have this strange obsession with putting on blackface…it happens every carnival season…it’s weird…
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I don’t see the problem. Besides not being especially funny, I don’t think anyone would be offended by this unless they were conditioned into a fairly high fear level of not being PC by a hysterical society.
It’s stupid. All advertizing is. So what.
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WTF? I read the translations on the link you provided. The blackface is bad enough, but the smiles make it seem like they are laughing at the situations they mention.
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Ditto storm. Changing the colour of the skin in an obvious way while highlighting the differences in education standards seems like calling attention to the right point to me.
Unless there’s some source of info they forgot to mention, the blog entry this came from is the most perfect example of victim mentality I can recall.
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Hmm. I think I get the advertisers’ idea here: people look at these ads and instead of seeing pictures of black kids and just blanking it out (over-familiar charity advertising – “compassion fatigue” etc) they see kids like their own – it’s about humanizing African kids, not debasing them.
What that says about the campaign’s target audience is not flattering (ie that they need to see white kids in order to identify with those that the charity is trying to help), but I’m not sure that should be seen as an indictment of the ad agency (or even of Unicef, tho you could debate that one).
Of course, blackface is a culturally tricky one to say the least… as is the overgeneralization of ‘Africans’ in the slogans. But ads tend to say what consumers are ready to understand: I’d bet dollars to doughnuts they tested different slogans and images and found that references to “African kids” worked better than, say, “poor Sub-Saharan African kids” (or whatever).
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Well, these ads would definitely get my attention.And it wouldn’t surprise me if the ad agency intended for people to get offended by it. Then the campaign and issue would get media attention.
I have to wonder though, is coloring your skin a different color inherently bad? Comedians do it often for comedic effect.
I’m not black, so perhaps I am not getting the racist subtext.
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Sorry to say but that’s really stupid to get upset about something without even understanding the real sense nor even getting the whole text! (and there’s a lot more text between the lines)
So please: Read it ALL! Translate it ALL!! and ask somebody who knows what the well-known german proverb “Farbe bekennen” really means which is citated here by the black faces of the kids (who by the way aren’t painted with mud, but theater make-up, which is also well-known as used by millions of little carol-singers each year to commemorate black King Balthasar)
The citated proverb, every german knows is “Farbe bekennen” – (literally translated it’s “to show/confess color”) but the real meaning (aside of a lot other meanings) is “to show/ to state/ to confess on which side you are really standing even if inconvenient (at this moment), to declare with whom you are really sympathsizing”
(it’s derived from the old military tactic to sneak/to get into enenmy land in disguise and to raise your flag (aka to show your “color”) in the moment of truth).
So it’s not the least racistic, with showing black kids instead you wouldn’t get the context at all and these white kids are showing with a sign of proudness,naturalness,logicalness,clearness on their faces which side they take (when it’s going as always about the (economic) interests of a (wealthy) G8 against Africa).
The text between the lines is saying (can’t read all as it’s very little on your photos) but at least the beginning:
“In Afrika kann jedes zweite Kind nicht zur Schule gehen, Alle müssen Farbe bekennen um das zu ändern. Schreiben Sie Angela Merkel. Alle Staaten -auch die G8- müssen ihr Versprechen einlösen” = In Africa every second child can’t go to school. Everybody has to “show colour” to change it. Write to Angela Merkel (german chancelor – (head of the german state)). Every state -the G8 too!- has to keep their promise to …
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