So, You Think You Came Up With A Funny Ad Or Commercial? Not Everyone May Agree With Your Fun Perception!

1. - Commercial communication often is 'pushed to the edge' to draw attention from the targeted audience. Sometimes, advertisers and their agencies think that 'fun' is also a smart way to achieve the same result. But 'fun perception' is a tricky issue: what you might feel as hilarious, someone else could consider just as 'bad taste' or even as outrageously offensive.

2. - A recent Italian TV campaign offers an example of the risks involved by relying on 'fun'. The local shop of a prestigious international ad agency network was asked to prepare a campaign meant to promote a food company's breakfast snacks.

3. - The agency came up with different versions of a commercial where a young girl was presented in a big garden, in front of a richly set breakfast table, while reeling off - in a highly improbable wording, given the kid's age - the request that she was looking for "a light, but inviting breakfast, capable of combining her wish for lightness with that for goodness". Her Mom reacts to such wishful request saying that such a snack did not exist, taking it to "get hit by a meteorite, if proved wrong". The obvious finale: seconds later a meteorite hits the ground and buries Mom!

   To prevent complaints about gender stereotypes (Author's comment and assumption) another version of the commercial presented an identical scenario with the girl's Dad hit by the meteorite (and the girl finding herself also buried: in short, the entire family is destroyed).

4. - Once the commercials were on air, they draw immediate attention from a broad audience. A lot of viewers appreciated the agency's creativity and irony, but others - heaven forbid! - found the scenario with a Mom hit by a meteorite on her head and dead as a doornail within smoke and fire as completely unacceptable, inappropriate, offensive and harmful to children's psychological wellbeing.

   Protests flooded in, 'Social Media Moms' claimed that kids viewing the commercials resulted terrified and ended up crying. Others accused the agency and the advertiser of callousness, having failed to consider how a little girl having lost one of her parents due to unfortunate circumstances would feel when confronted with the situation shown in the commercials.

   The Advertiser and its agency argued - to their defense - that the situation presented played on...