Visceral Shock - horrific advertisements

Barnardo’s ads try to provide light for those who may be living in poverty. To me some of their ads have gone too far and have been lawfully banned from public viewing. Barnardo's use shock tactics to tackle child poverty, but this strategy rebounded and they were reported to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) after hours of viewing. The first in the series of newspaper ads from Barnardo's shows a new-born baby with a cockroach crawling out of his mouth. Another illustrates a baby with a silver spoon in its mouth and the third campaign features a baby with a mentholated spirits bottle in its mouth while the final one shows a baby with a syringe. If the images are too shocking to look at, the threat to this advertisement is that we become too uncomfortable to look at all. This shouldn’t be what the company wants to be trying to get across.

 I believe that this is a clearly depicted visceral shock advertisement and personally I am glad that it was stricken from being placed in any future advertisements but unfortunately those pictures weren’t the only type of ad that was complained about coming from Barnardo’s.

A TV ad for children's charity Barnardo's featuring a girl being repeatedly hit about the head by her father has been cleared by the advertising regulator despite almost 500 complaints that it was distressing and offensive. The commercial aims to show how a lifetime of abuse leads a young girl into a cycle of drugs, jail and poverty. The ad shows a looped sequence of five scenes that speed up to exaggerate the repeated character of abuse.

I don’t agree with either of these forms of advertising from this company. I think that both of these are degrading and horrific types of advertisements. However I have a feeling that this company chose to do these ad and commercial, possibly knowing they would have this negative reaction to it, but then also presenting a more widely broadcasted advertisement. If I think about this in the opposite, I think that these ads were shown more now than they probably would have been because of how many complaints and stories were distributed after the initial viewing. Were these ads effective? I would say yes, but that doesn’t mean that I agree with the vividly detailed way they were shown.