Hot on the heels of MasterCard’s far left-themed ad campaign, the History Channel — and/or famed ad agency Ogilvy & Mather drop the mask and demonstrate their own punitive liberalism, as James Piereson would call it. Click here to read the story over at Red State; click on the photos below to see them in larger scale, and read the text on the message board Photoshopped into each ad:
Update: Before it scrolls off or is airbrushed out of existence, here’s a screen capture of the 2009 Clio Awards page, the advertising industry’s chief award, showing the three photos above, complete with History Channel logos.
More: On Monday, the Silicon Alley business Website dubbed the ads, “Certainly thought-provoking, possibly anti-American”, (Gosh, you think?) adding on Wednesday that “We liked the ads — or at least appreciated their ability to spark conversation. We only wish digital publishers could come up with units that allowed agencies to get so creative.”
Yes, brilliant way to creatively tarnish the History Channel’s largely positive brand name.
(Bumped to top.)
Update (5/22/09 1:27 AM PDT): Airbrushing — it’s not just for creating ad campaigns any more! The ads appear to be removed from the Clio Award site, or at least they’re hidden safely away somewhere; compare the screen capture I have above with the current Website page. As of now, they’re still listed in the site’s accompanying PDF folder (I’ve downloaded a copy), but who knows for how long?
Update (1:56 AM): As of now, the originals are still online at the Clio site, even if no longer linked to via Webpage. Follow the links here to view them.
Update (12:37 PM): Caleb Howe of Red State, who’s owned this story adds, “CLIO Removes Ogilvy Ads Pending ‘Investigation.’”
Update (6:30 PM): New update from Caleb: “Rewriting the History of the History Channel Ads.”
Late Update (5/27/09): These ads, and a couple of others along similar lines are the subject of my latest Silicon Graffiti video. Click here to watch!
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29 Comments
1. Steven Den Beste:That 1.03 million number is totally bogus. Isn’t that from one of the discredited Lancet articles?
May 21, 2009 - 7:27 pm 2. Steven Den Beste:This guy did some investigating.
http://www.redstate.com/absentee/2009/05/21/history-is-rewritten-by-the-winners/
The History Channel denies all involvement, condemns the ads, and is C&Ding everyone who has copies of them with the “History Channel” logo still in place.
May 21, 2009 - 8:19 pm 3. History Is (Re)Written By The Winners - Caleb’s blog - RedState:[...] still featured on the award page! It’s kinda hard to win an award for fake ads. (Update: Ed Driscoll notes that the CLIO website has removed the ads from the web page. I did, however, keep a [...]
May 22, 2009 - 4:13 am 4. John Manders:That last one, with Big Ben in the background, is making the case for Mark Steyn’s America Alone thesis. Sure, there are more British babies named Mohammed than George. That’s a reflection of immigration/demographics, not necessarily antipathy to the United States’ president.
May 22, 2009 - 5:49 am 5. EL Rider:The History Channel had a good reputation? Well they certainly have thrown that away over the past few years.
May 22, 2009 - 7:44 am 6. Henry Bowman:Re: Mohammed vs. George: Plus, the simple fact that about 50 per cent of Muslim males are named Mohammed, versus a much smaller fraction of infidel males named George.
May 22, 2009 - 7:52 am 7. ajacksonian:I preferred it when the History Channel was the constant re-run of WWII material and, thus, The Hitler Channel. Now its into things that can be entertaining, but aren’t what I would call ‘history’. YMMV.
Not only is the first one bogus using the Lancet numbers, it is underestimating by a factor of at least four the amount dead due to Saddam Hussein from his rise to power to his extraction from a spider hole. The number it has is *just* for the Shia uprising in 1992, and an underestimate by all accounts. No one has done an accurate tally of roadside graves, bodies buried in copses of trees or the number actually disappeared into Saddam’s jails with shredders. All attributable to the tyrant’s bloody rise to power and fall from it.
May 22, 2009 - 7:53 am 8. Mikey NTH:ajacksonian: I agree with your assessment of the History Channel’s recent offerings. The search for bigfoot and all of the other parranormal stuff really does not belong on a ‘History’ Channel.
May 22, 2009 - 8:02 am 9. Billy Bob:Whatever.
I work in Advertising ( not at O&M ). This sort of thing is very typical, especially around awards season. The industry is full of people who are fashionably radical, but their understanding of politics and world events in typically very shallow.
So when they try to present a political message, they inevitably screw it up and produce something that looks like it was conceived by an angry teenager.
As others have states the 1 Million + number has been thoroughly debunked – and IIRC Hiroshima didn’t immediately follow Pearl Harbor, there was some sort of war, or something, in between.
Also I suspect that the Muslim babies comparison is meant to cow the brits – as in, they have more babies, so you’re a hypocrite for wanting to determine the future of your country – but instead comes off as a call to arms.
May 22, 2009 - 8:02 am 10. orthodoc:OK, consider thoughts provoked.
First slide:
The Iraq body count (not the BS Lancet study) reports 92,000-100,500 civilian deaths in Iraq since the war started. This counts those killed by suicide bombs, direct attacks, paramilitary, and military.
Along with other human rights organizations, The Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reported that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis. Another 500,000 are estimated to have died in Saddam’s needless war with Iran. Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam’s reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam’s 8,000-odd days in power.
So slide 1 is anti-American BS.
Second slide:
POW deaths in Japanese captivity totaled 467,000. Detailed by country:
China 400,000
Netherlands-Military 8,500
U.K. 12,430; U.K. Colonies 11,060
Canada 270
Philippines 27,260
Australia 7,410
United States 12,643
The civilian victims of Japanese war crimes totaled 5,469,000. Detailed by country: China 3,695,000;
Indochina 457,000;
Korea 378,000;
Indonesia 375,000;
Malaya 346,000
Philippines 119,000
Burma 60,000
Pacific Islands 57,000
Japanese civilian deaths totaled 570,000.
And, if I can point this out to anyone stupid enough not to understand, the Japanese attacked the US. The US responded. When you break into someone’s house carrying a knife, you can’t whine and call “unfair – disproportionate response” when they come downstairs with a shotgun. So the modern idea that the US should presumably have only killed as many Japanese as the Japanese killed Americans is also anti-American BS.
It’s frankly depressing to see so many in the West swallow and parrot back this kind of nonsense.
May 22, 2009 - 8:03 am 11. Abdi Addoh:That is totally eFed up? Even if the Iraq death numbers were true, who killed them and what was the intention? Do we surrender just because our enemy can kill people more that we ever could or would? Do we pull out because fundamentalists have taken a tack of killing as many people, much of whom are their own countrymen, as a protest to our presence? Is ethnic violence our fault? These people are being handed freedom on a platter. They can’t seem to swallow.
May 22, 2009 - 8:29 am 12. Don51:The Hiroshima numbers are equally bogus. Simply living in and around the city and dieing 50 years later can not be attributed to use of the bomb. Here’s an actual rational take -
http://www.warbirdforum.com/hirodead.htm
and still no one pays attention to the Japanese ‘concern’ for civilian in the American territory of the Philippines [already scheduled for independence when the Japanese invaded].
http://battlingbastardsbataan.com/som.htm
How about some real history!
May 22, 2009 - 8:38 am 13. Frank H:orthodoc said: “When you break into someone’s house carrying a knife, you can’t whine and call “unfair – disproportionate response” when they come downstairs with a shotgun.”
Actually, in the Socialist Republic of New Jersey, you can. (In civil court at least)
May 22, 2009 - 8:55 am 14. NahnCee:According to redstate.com this campaign is supposed to have originated from Johannesburg. Which is a puzzlement. What’d we ever do to J’burg? Or did NY liberal staff merely e-mail it to J’burg so that it would be on O&M’s letterhead, but safely out of view of the American blogosphere?
May 22, 2009 - 9:38 am 15. Thomass:1. Steven Den Beste:
“That 1.03 million number is totally bogus. Isn’t that from one of the discredited Lancet articles?”
The Saddam figures are bogus as well. He caused over a million deaths. Funny the left counts civilians murdered by terrorists against the US figure (which is a grey area, but I would say civilians killed by US military mistakes are fair to include) but leaves out war deaths by Saddam (completely unnecessary war deaths as he was the aggressor)… The only way to get to a 300k figure is to leave out Saddam’s wars….
May 22, 2009 - 9:44 am 16. Thomass:6. Henry Bowman:
“Re: Mohammed vs. George: Plus, the simple fact that about 50 per cent of Muslim males are named Mohammed, versus a much smaller fraction of infidel males named George.”
Considering their other numbers, I’d double check them.
May 22, 2009 - 9:46 am 17. tim maguire:There is an additional important issue often overlooked in the outrage over these bogus numbers games–the assumption that our enemies have a moral right to determine the scope of the conflict. If they decide to kill 1,000 of ours, then we are limited to 1,000 of theirs (crime begins at the 1,001st, apparently). See how that worked? There is no limit to how many of ours they can get kill, only to how many of theirs we can kill in response! Foreign policy by abacus, by bean counting (since human lives are simply beans, chits, widgets by the lefty’s standards). Their killing is more legitimate and our deaths are less tragic.
Arguably anti-American? Well yes, just as blue is arguably blue.
May 22, 2009 - 9:54 am 18. Assistant Village Idiot:When progressives use big numbers, it is usually part of an intimidation tactic to show how they know facts that the great unwashed can’t comprehend.
As they usually screw them up in similar ways to what we see here, it undermines their argument somewhat. But here’s the point: that doesn’t much bother them, if they can create the right impression
May 22, 2009 - 9:56 am 19. grackle:What would be effective is emails to the ad agency’s clients informing them you will no longer be buying their products or services because of the anti-American ad agency they are using. Hits ‘em where they live. I’ve been to their website but cannot find any client info. Anyone have any ideas how a client list could be obtained?
May 22, 2009 - 10:02 am 20. EdGi:grackle is right – O&M would never allow false psywar propaganda against our enemies to be attributed to O&M, and we need to go to their clients over allowing false anti-American psywar propaganda by our enemies. Anyone in the business knows the S. Africa office dodge is BS.
May 22, 2009 - 11:17 am 21. DM-B:Just for starters:
Per ADWEEK, 1/9/09 – “The agency’s client list includes IBM, American Express, Kodak, Unilever, Kraft Foods, Lenovo and Morgan Stanley…”
http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3i7b57851228481ca5445cfc07adfb6cb9
May 22, 2009 - 5:01 pm 22. Nick:The ads write themselves.
Find a number for the civilians killed in their Dresden homes, then compare that, in Hitler’s favour, to the Blitz.
Maybe if they could figure out a way to insult Americans without defending brutal, militarist, colonial dictators in the process, they could be forgiven. After all, insulting Americans is like breathing, right? They do it in your sleep. They can’t help being anti-American. They don’t know anyone who’s not.
But it wouldn’t occur to them that they’re whitewashing the record of some brutal dictators, too.
May 22, 2009 - 10:15 pm 23. William:As an alumnus of O&M, I am horrified to see this. Horrified and ashamed. As an associate of the late David Ogilvy, I know he too would be ashamed. His motto for the firm as “Gentlemen with brains” (before the era of gender-correctness). There is not much of either in these concepts.
That said, please realize that agencies generally are not innocent of creating ads that never run or run once in some obscure medium, often paid for by the agency, in order to submit them as eligible for ad awards.
When the ads become notorious, no one wants to ‘fess to having anything to do with them. Only if they can anonymously mount the awards rostrum, collect their award and post it on their wall or resume without full details, do they come out in the open.
Also, the creative ad community is infamous for harboring and fostering left-wing views, encouraged by peer pressures. Many years ago, when I was a cub and espoused a conservative point of view, I was told by the head of the art department (not O&M) that I might as well leave the business since conservatives can’t be “creative.”
I went on to win many of these same awards, legitimately, and apolitically.
David, I cry for you.
May 23, 2009 - 10:44 am 24. Jack Olson:William, I wrote to four Ogilvy & Mather clients to point out the anti-American libels their ad agency produced and to ask whether they want to be represented by such a company. I suppose I’ll get form letter replies, if any. Yet, I tried to contact the History Channel and AETN about the Ogilvy libels and their part in them. You can’t do it. They don’t publish their mailing address. Nor does a search of their website offer any comment at all on the the Ogilvy libels, not even the complaints of trademark infringement which provoked their cease-and-desist demands. Nor does the Ogilvy website say anything about it, not even to mention they won a Clio award for it. Now that the Clio website has removed it from their website, too, what we’re seeing is institutions trying to airbrush an embarrassing episode out of their history. It’s futile. In the end, the liar deceives only himself.
May 24, 2009 - 7:11 am 25. Ed Driscoll » New Silicon Graffiti Video: “21st Century Schizoid Mad Men”:[...] Ogilvy & Mather’s Revisionist History Channel Ads. [...]
May 27, 2009 - 10:55 am 26. jambosana:I’m not sure if the George vs. Mohammed stats are meant to be a comment upon attitudes towards George W. Bush. George is also the name of England’s patron saint.
May 27, 2009 - 2:00 pm 27. Ed Driscoll:Jambosana,
That’s how I took it as well. As I mentioned in the new video (see link directly above your comment) I assumed that was Ogilvy’s shot at England in general, not GWB or the GWOT.
Their other two ads, on the other hand…
Ed
May 27, 2009 - 2:12 pm 28. jambosana:Yup. Without getting into ghoulish casualty counting a Nanking – Hiroshima comparison might have been more controversial or, at the very least, more thought provoking.
May 27, 2009 - 3:11 pm 29. ActiCons » History Is (Re)Written By The Winners:[...] still featured on the award page! It’s kinda hard to win an award for fake ads. (Update: Ed Driscoll notes that the CLIO website has removed the ads from the web page. I did, however, keep a [...]
May 28, 2009 - 4:13 amSorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.