Respect Authority

If this recent ad from IFAW’s anti-whaling campaign doesn’t immediately seize your attention, you’re either colorblind, totally blind, an Eskimo, or not a really hungry Eskimo.

IFAW Ad in Sydney, Australia

It is disgusting, IFAW. My thoughts and prayers go out to the family of that poor mermaid.

Jokes aside, it’s a pretty intense message despite the fact that it, and it feels weird to describe the poster this way, might not be obvious enough to the random passerby. The stopwhaling.com.au URL is a bit of an afterthought, both physically and conceptually, in the context of the rest of the poster and kind of fails to have an impact next to the stinking pile of bleeding “guts” two feet away. You have to wonder how many people will stare at this poster for a few minutes, think to themselves, “Well, good thing I never killed no whales,” and move on, missing or disregarding the URL, which one could argue is the whole reason for the ad in the first place.

This is why advertising’s increasing convergence with installation art and street art isn’t necessarily a relationship that’s working for anyone. Considering the latter two genres are converging on their own as well, that makes this ultimate convergence less of a random drunken threesome that fortunately nobody remembers the next day, and more of a creepy swinging couple type of awkwardness.

Advertising is not quite fitting into the worlds of installation art and street art, as it struggles to get its messages through mediums it does not yet fully understand. Accordingly, even though this piece is stunning and visually attractive (in so much as a disemboweled whale carcass can possibly be), it’s not the most effective ad, unless it was for, I don’t know, an appetite suppressant. Or maybe, upon a more detailed look at the leaking innards, a campaign for the versatility of bacon.

And on that note, I have to believe the aforementioned guts are fake, if not only to avoid health code violations, but also because, otherwise, PETA would be launching a “Stop killing whales so you can use their intestines in stop killing whales ads” campaign soon.

[BestAdsOnTV.com]