Benetton ‘Unhate’ Ad Campaign Features World Leaders Kissing

By Christina Ng

At first, the images are shocking. President Obama planting a kiss on Chinese President Hu Jintao’s lips. German Chancellor Angela Merkel smooches French President Nicolas Sarkozy, her nation’s economic rival.

These images aren’t the latest political scandal. They’re a new ad campaign from Italian clothing company United Colors of Benetton called “Unhate.”

The images are digitally manipulated but they send a pointed message. The newly unveiled UNHATE Foundation seeks to promote a culture of tolerance and combat hatred around the world, the company said in a news release.

Click here to see all the images.

The campaign was launched today in Paris.

“Unhate is a message that invites us to consider that hate and love are not as far away from each other as we think,” the campaign’s website said. “Actually, the two opposing sentiments are often in a delicate and unstable balance. Our campaign promotes a shift in the balance: don’t hate, Unhate.”

The website features photos of people holding large banners of the images “on the walls of locations symbolic of the desperately-needed peace process: Tel Aviv, New York, Rome, Milan and Paris,” the news release says.

The ads have already become a source of controversy.

After the images went up, the Vatican quickly denounced an image of Pope Benedict XVI kissing Egyptian Imam Ahmed el Tayyeb on the lips.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi called the digitally altered image an “unacceptable” and offensive manipulation of the pope’s likeness, according to the Associated Press.

Benetton removed the image shortly thereafter and it is no longer on the website.

The company is known for its striking, and often controversial, ads. Past ads have shown a priest kissing a nun, a white baby breast-feeding from a black woman and three human hearts with the words “white,” “black” and “yellow” printed over them.

What's the CONTROVERSY now?

Branding Your Innerself…

'Could it be that nothing builds customer loyalty like a little controversy? It sure seems that way sometimes. For example, have you ever noticed that whenever The Future (us) TheFutureForward.net run articles with "Black Pride" or “ Party” or even “Pride Parties” in the headline, reader comments flow like water - from both the Twitteries and the wake-me-when-it's-over crowd.

This speaks to the power of polarization, putting something out there that immediately evokes strong feelings from the audience, one way or the other. Either you're "for it" or "against it." No in between. Polarization is a natural progression of knowing your customers and single-mindedly focusing on doing everything possible to appeal to them, getting into their heads and figuring how to best connect with them. And to heck with anybody else. If you're speaking relevantly to your audience, you really don't care about the rest of the universe. If you're selling haircare products, you don't care about the muscle heads in Miami. If you're selling a crop herbicide, you don't care about the barista in Berkeley. If you sell hunting rifles, you don't concern yourself with the pacifist in Pasadena. And if you're selling Speedos, well, I'd be surprised if you ran an ad in AARP Magazine.
And if that happens to rub some folks the wrong way, so what?

Martin Lindstom, in his book Buy-ology, which focuses on the science of neuro-marketing to explain why we purchase the products we do, concludes that the reason for the runaway success of the Calvin Klein jeans featuring a 14-year-old Brooke Shields isn't what we first thought. It wasn't the sex that sold. It was the controversy. Too many marketers, though, avoid polarization. Why stir up any controversy? Why would we put anything out there that someone might find a bit off-putting? Imagine the letters! Nothing came between Brooke and her Calvin's...

If you think about it, attempting to avoid polarization is really just another way of trying to be all things to all people. And as we learned on the first day of Marketing 101, that doesn't work. The thing is, if you put something out there that really resonates with your audience (and it's authentic), and someone who is not your target weighs in with their dissatisfaction, it'll probably incite your customers to come to your defense. The "controversy" surrounding your messaging gives your loyal customers permission to enter the conversation and stick up for you. Be wary, though. Creating controversy for controversy sake doesn't necessarily polarize people. It just pisses them off. Taste matters. And if your target market sees your "faux controversy" as a misguided attempt to get some cheap ink, you're a goner.

The most effective controversy is the kind that comes to you, rather than you looking for it. When Benetton caused a stir with its ads a decade ago showing AIDS patients, the company did it as a way of supporting that cause, not necessarily to shock or alienate the public at large. Yet, here we are discussing it years later. How many other fashion ads from that era can you say you remember?

In this age, when people are bombarded with literally thousands of options and thousands of selling messages every day, you need to engineer something into your products, its positioning or it communications to keep from fading into that bland gray morass.
After all, at a beauty pageant, no one remembers Miss Congeniality.