Anybody surfing the internet last Thursday might have come across it-an ad on one of those national news sites. It was for emergency items like first-aid kits and those meals-in-storage that the military uses. Legit need. Legit company. Legit advertisement. You could even say every household ought to have an emergency stash of food, water and bandages around. Not to mention flashlights, a radio, some batteries, and-
What caught the eye was the ad’s artwork. It featured a towering tornado chewing through a road and putting a ton of dirt in the air. Oh, dear.
Folks in the now computerized world of advertising are pretty fast. With a point and click they can redesign an ad that would’ve taken hours to remake back in the days of yore, when newspapers were still being pasted up by hand. So surely this particular ad could have been taken down easily enough and replaced with something else for the next week or so. Or even completely rewritten. Especially since it appeared right alongside all those stories about the tornado that just ripped through Oklahoma a few days ago, leaving a mass of grief in its wake.
Come on, folks. A little respect.
Editorial, Pages 18 on 05/25/2013