Adshel reinstates safe gay sex campaign after homophobia backlash
Outdoor company Adshel has backed down to a growing backlash against its decision to pull down billboards promoting safe sex after it was accused of homophobia.
The company said that its reason for reversing its decision was because when it had initially acted on complaints it did not realise they had been organised by the Australian Christian Lobby.
In a press release this afternoon, the company said:
“Following ACL Queensland director Wendy Francis’ acknowledgement that the complaints received by Adshel, Brisbane City Council and the Advertising Standards Bureau regarding QAHC’s campaign have been orchestrated by the Australian Christian Lobby, Adshel is reinstating the ‘Rip and Roll’ campaign.
Tolerance reigns.
Well i have to say, at least Adshel know when to hear reason – digging their heels in would have been worse.
That said, it isourtageous that bodies such as the ACL can do thsi sort of thing and not be investigated.
I personally find their constant harping on about this magical superhero that can walk on water and rise from the grave exhaustively offensive, but you don’t see me orchestrating hate campaigns against them.
apology to the client and community???
How can a politician forge a series of complaints to suit her own agenda yet still claim to be democratically representative? ACL shouldn’t get away with this.
…..that Adshel has been the target of a coordinated ACL campaign …..
Enough said.
Thanks Adshel
Thank God for common decency.
common sense prevails….
praise the Lord for the Internet.
if FB or the internet in general did not exist.. this would have been swept under the carpet and the posters not put pack and it wouldn’t even make national or international news.
Thank you Internet.
Amen.
Thank god. But honestly Adshel, that’s not a great excuse. All the protests had the same format and surely it doesn’t matter whether it’s a “coordinated campaign” or individuals. The fact was that you acted in an unseemly manner when you broke contract and pulled down the ad without notifying the advertisers.
Sanity, common sense and reason reign
’bout time…..
Well done ACL!
Some free national exposure!!!!
Adshel should run the campaign free nationwide as an apology.
Adshel CEO Steve McCarthy said the company had been the “target” of a an organised campaign by the ACL. He said in a statement: “It has now become clear that Adshel has been the target of a coordinated ACL campaign. This has led us to review our decision to remove the campaign and we will therefore reinstate the campaign with immediate effect.”
With a Months bonus… thank you
A victory for common sense. And a clever move by Adshel, always know when to admit you were completely and utterly wrong.
Funny – they have flip floped twice to organised campaigns.
so glad to hear the ads are being put back up. shame Adshel had to make themselves look like the victims in their press release though, rather than just apologising. in my opinion, the real reason they are putting the ads back up is due to the public outrage that stemmed from them being taken down in the first place.
Badshel are surely taking the piss.
They didnt notice all 47 complaints are near identical?
(see http://www.qahc.org.au/files/s.....laints.pdf)
They going to have to do better than that.
Like a very swift and sizeable donation to the AIDS Council.
And fire the idiot PR who thought the “unaware” excuse would fly.
lazy lazy…maybe you should have checked the source first, then spoken to the client, then waited for a decision……I would still question the homophobia that would seem apparent in their organisation and management…..and an apology would be nice..
Thank ‘God’ LOL
Those Christians and their underhanded tactics – they’re not very moral are they?
Power to the people. Nice work Adshel for coming to your senses…
it made the front cover – http://streetpress.com.au/online_mags/TO/TO_1528/
I do hope the bible-toting ACL understand the comic irony in their spurious and underhanded actions actually giving this campaign more media than just the original Adshels.
The AdShel PR team have created another “How Not to Manage a Social Media Crisis” case study… They really failed on this one.
If Adshel wishes the community to believe that each of those letters were separate independent complaints, this leaves two options
1. That Adshel wants us to believe their staff are idiots.
2. That Adshel thinks the people who responded to their homophobic decision are idiots.
To Adshel’s credit, there is some strong evidence that the first option may be true, take for example the well-executed attempt be Adshel to destroy their brand image today.
What Adshel should have done, is take ownership of the mistake and admit full responsibility. Anything less than an unconditional mea culpa by Adshel fails to validate the concerns of the community and instead tries to downplay what took place as some sort of forgivable misunderstanding.
Find some backbone Adshel, put an apology to QAHC on the front page of your website, extend the breadth/length of the QAHC at your own expense and take ownership of your mistake.
On a side note, I’d like to pass on the widespread praise of one Adshel employee through-out the day. Candice, who was manning the phones in Adshel’s Brisbane office. Throughout the day – in what could only imagine would be extremely trying circumstances – Candice maintained a friendly, positive phone manner and the utmost level of professionalism.
Perhaps an ad agency which doesn’t pander to the views of hatemongers and homophobes is looking for a new receptionist? If so, just give their Brisbane office a call and make her an offer, I suspect she would like a change of scenery.
-Adam Gibson
Does that mean the next time they get less than 30 letters of complaint, they will remove the ads without consulting the client? And the next time we want an ad removed, we just need to organize 30 letters of complaint..?
Meekly caving to a vocal, bigoted minority is moral cowardice of the worst kind.
Gee this easy over a simple safe sex advertising campaign?
Maybe there’s hope for this kind of common sense from Penny Wong and Labor over same sex marriage…..wait, I am dreaming. 😉
What ad next? Bestiality?
30 complaints vs. 30 000 – whose opinion is more valid? At least this time Adshel came to the correct decision. If only they could have been as clever as GOA – they said they wouldn’t take them down unless the ASB to tell them to take it down. Judging by the overwhelming public support for the ads, I fail to see how that will ever happen!
and whats wrong with a bit of cow love George? yeah baby give me that milk…
A nice touch that the ACL actually handed this beautiful campaign lots more profile than it might otherwise have had.
Divine intervention indeed.
I’m so glad that people are realising how much power the ACL wields. Now let’s have the same backlash against their lobbying for internet censorship. Tell the ACL and Senator Conroy that we will not stand for it.
I hope that the ads are strategically targetted in front of Christian churches – I imagine those priests are having more unsafe sex than most of the rest of us heathens…
Funniest thing is that the ACL have drawn infinitely more attention to the campaign than EVER would jaw generated on it’s own. It’s one f the blandest pieces of creative I have seen this year. Good on you – muppets.
Well done Adshel? I think not.
Well done GOA, a Brisbane billboard firm who didn’t cave in the first place and told the ACL the ads on their outdoor sites would stay up.
A massive failure from Adshel, who’ve revealed a few dozen complaints is enough to scare them into dropping a campaign.
We’re are the lions when you need them!!
Great result – AdShel is lying about not being aware of letter writing campaign however. Read the complaints – most contain the same phrases and wording. More than half categorise the people depicted in the ad as engaging in ‘foreplay’, and most feature a heavy use of capitalised emphasis, often of the same phrases.
Anyone who says they didn’t notice this is either lying or terrible at their job.
Even if the ACL complaints had really been from unaffiliated members of the public, Adshel should have still stuck to its guns and left the ads up. Good that they are reversing the decision now.
@Adam Gibson
The complaints about the ads have been published online. I browsed through them today, and many of them are so similar I had to check I wasn’t reading the same thing twice.
Clearly an orchestrated campaign, and a weak one at that.
I sincerely hope the organisation that paid to have the ads displayed is compensated for the ads being taken down. Surely that must have been a breach of contract.
This is a win for fairness but the debate has been entirely one-sided and won’t progress the minds of anyone ultra-conservative who may need to hear a voice if reason on sexuality issues.
From what i have seen, the response to anyone with a divergent view on the ad has often been unreasonably vitriolic and at times intolerant. That may be nothing new for social media but the breathless astonishment levelled against anyone who found the ad provocative or confronting (neither of which make them homophobic) was disappointing.
Rip and Roll Adshell
This excerpt reminds me of Maude Flanders (ned’s wife from the Simpsons)
“Please, for
the sake of all Christians and children, could something be done about this advertising campaign?”
Well thank goodness for a bit of sense, and plaudits for Adshel in standing up to an increasingly aggressive and offensive organisation in the Australian “Christian” Lobby.
It is a sick and sad state of affairs when a group that pretends to be concerned about “ethics” wants to increase the risks of death and misery for a significant section of the Australian population.
Surely it is time the government showed some guts too, and drove this morally bankrupt group out of our schools by shutting down the Howard government’s school chaplaincy program.
Pulling out is never the best solution
yay that is fantastic news. Glad there is a bit of sense in Australia. You guys are doing us all proud 🙂
The ACL was on record early this morning through a Christian website celebrating the success of it’s grass roots campaign – see http://au.christiantoday.com/a...../11192.htm.
Whoever wrote (and was involved in approving) the misleading statement should spend some time reflecting on their actions – and swiftly calling for a PR agency review if the cousel was outsourced.
I actually read through the list of complaints cooked up by Wendy and Co. Kind of wish I hadn’t, scarey to realise there are actually people out there with views so divorced from reality – and at least one of them in politics!.
As a few mates have said, ‘how many gays does God have to create before the ACL and their ilk realise God loves gays too!’.
Bad form Adshell, bad form indeed, particularly rather than own up to sheer lunacy you hide behind some apparently orchestrated campaign.
30 photocopied complaints is a campaign? I’ll be able to save our clients a fortune if that’s all it takes to make change.
I think Wendy should actually get more airtime on TV. I’ve seen her in debate against the lady who leads the Sex Party and she wiped the floor with Wendy and the ACL loonies. The more exposure they get, the more people will realise how deluded and silly they are. Even my Christian friends are embarrassed by their antics…
Adshell need to start making decisions for themselves! Glad they put it the ad back up though!
Hopefully Adshel learns their lesson about how difficult public homophobic actions are to live down. This event is still attracting support – over 60,000 people now.
The Power of the people to change disciminatory practices
Wendy Francis/Christian Lobby should be charged for fraud
Stone them I say.
The ACL I mean!!
Evil bigots.
The ACL are stuck in the past and on the wrong side of history.
They probably protested the end of slavery as well.
I think people might have missed the point. Apart from the homophobic and underhanded actions of the christian crazy Wendy Francis where is the respect by a company hired to do a job to their client. Before they went of half-cocked Adshel should have talked to thier client, considered the advertising standards and whether there was a breach and then made a considered response on the basis of rationality not blind reaction. An apology is yet to come but I think QAHC deserve some free advertising space!!
I was so annoyed at the whole situation I generated a video highlighting the ignorance of some of the complaints and messages posted about the campaign – I mentioned this in a similar post to, so I hope the spam is tolerated, but I wouldn’t mind the message being spread further, and even some feedback on how well the message comes across.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl4x1li91S0