I was spending a bit of time yesterday afternoon researching marketing and advertising campaigns to feature on my company blog… which if you’re interested you can see here!

I managed to find myself on a website about ‘controversial’ advertising campaigns and I saw a few ‘gems’ like these:

But then I saw the WWF Tsunami Campaign advert from 2009 and my heart stopped for a second.  I lost someone during 9/11, so I tend to avoid all references to it – I’ll change the channel, switch off the radio, leave the website, read another magazine, basically do whatever is necessary to avoid seeing the images and hearing the tragic stories of the day.  It’s an all too painful reminder and I just want to stay away from it.

You’ve probably already seen the image I’m talking about – I’m not going to put the picture on my blog, but you can take a look at the AdFreak website, which has a great post about insensitive campaigns around 9/11.

In a nutshell it’s a picture of New York including the Twin Towers, with a huge number of planes aimed at it… it says that the 2001 terrorist attack killed a couple of thousand of people, compared to the 2005 tsunami which killed a couple of hundred thousand people.  It says that our planet is powerful and must be respected and conserved… I’m paraphrasing – you can get the idea.

I am so angry and upset… why do any tragedies need to be compared. I think it’s patronising and offensive to anyone who has ever lost a loved one in any kind of tragedy.

It’s almost like their taunting… “oh, you think you’re tragedy was worse than mine, but mine was bigger”

All tragedies are tragedies (the clue is in the name) regardless of whether they are the result of a natural disaster or inflicted by other humans, the numbers are just the numbers, each single life lost is a devastating blow to someone.

And now I’m crying again. And this is exactly why I try to stay away from all this shit.