Collapsed Building Ad Yanked
Vendors distance themselves from material inadvertently reminiscent of terrorist attacks.Frank Thorsberg, PCWorld.com
The horrible image of the World Trade Center tumbling into destruction after a terrorist attack is not something any company wants to be associated with.
That's why PowerQuest has pulled an advertisement that used a demolished building to promote a new version of its Drive Image software. The ad was scheduled to run in 13 publications this month.
Other companies with images or products that might appear related to the disaster have also taken action to avoid criticism by a public that has become highly sensitized.
The publisher of the online role-playing game Majestic, an interactive thriller involving murder and corporate intrigue, suspended the popular game after Tuesday's attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. Another computer game, in which players defend the World Trade Center from kamikaze pilots, has also been withdrawn. The game, WTC Defender, had been available for download at Angelfire.com. In the game, players had to shoot down planes heading for the twin towers. If an aircraft managed to get through, the buildings blew up. A note on the game site reads: "WTC Defender--the game has been removed. Please note--the game was not meant to offend anyone, my deepest condolences to all of you who have lost someone in this tragedy."
Unintended Disaster Links
The PowerQuest ad shows the collapse of a high-rise building in an urban setting. Three images show the building imploding followed by a fourth image showing the structure restored to its original condition.
The company's Drive Image utility lets you create an image of your PC's hard drive that can be stored on a CD, Zip drive or other storage media for use if the computer crashes.
"That is what we were trying to show with the ad," explains Mark Carpenter, director of public relations at PowerQuest. "We were making an analogy to a hard drive crashing and Drive Image being able to bring it back to original image."
Carpenter says PowerQuest officials were in a meeting Tuesday to discuss the pending release of the updated program--which was slated to debut the following week--when the first reports about the deadly attacks in New York and Washington were televised.
"After we had watched the World Trade Center towers burning and crashing, we knew that was not an image we wanted associated with our company," he says.
The company began using the image of the demolition of an abandoned building in its ad campaign about two years ago because it tested in well with focus groups in illustrating the purpose of the Drive Image software.
Too Close for Comfort
The image in the PowerQuest ad became just too close to the awful images of the collapsed buildings in Manhattan.
"Not that it was intended, but we didn't want anybody to get the wrong idea that we were capitalizing on a tragedy for our own benefits," Carpenter says.
PowerQuest management moved quickly to kill the ads in publications that had not already gone to press at the time of Tuesday's attacks. But the demolition ad appears in two magazines that are already published: a PC magazine in the U.K. and in the October issue of PC World, which was shipped a week before the terrorist attacks.
"We wanted to proactively go out to the publications that hadn't printed or that weren't so far along in production, so we could pull the ads," Carpenter says. "We wanted to head it off, if we could."