The excellent Abduzeedo blog featured a showcase of Benetton adverts today. The introduction talked about the creativity, talent and courage of the adverts, and called them awesome and controversial. It’s a good showcase article, but I think the supposed brilliance and controversy of the ‘United Colors’ campaign is vastly over exaggerated. Benetton might have made a heavy impact in 1986, but that impact has long since been lost.
Multiracial Is Controversial?
I was 10 in 1986, so maybe the multiracial kids in the Benetton ads were a bigger deal. Oh look, one of them has a Palestinian flag next to him, and the other an Israeli. These commercials are the most controversial because they linked the company’s brand and ethos with a political stance. There is a natural link between the many color options which Benetton was promoting, and the idea of a united many colored society.
These multiracial adverts might be considered influential too. Ethnic diversity in advertising imagery is pretty much the norm these days. Friends and families in television advertising demonstrate far more diversity than society does in reality. Yet the likes of Coca Cola’s ‘Hilltop’ advertisement specifically focused on ethnically diverse participants as early as 1971. How much of a trendsetter was Benetton fifteen years later?
Controversy For Its Own Sake
In the 1990s Benetton took to advertising using real life images entirely unrelated to its product. One of the most controversial examples was the picture of a man dying of AIDS, surrounded by his family. Others included the victim of a Mafia killing, another a picture of war cemetery.
It’s not unusual for companies to create advertisements that bear little relation to the actual product. They’re defining a brand. Benetton is doing the same, just deliberately courting controversy to do so. While the company may be highlighting issues it genuinely supports, the main purpose of the advertising is to promote Benetton and its products. They believe that linking themselves with such issues, and therefore branding themselves as a moral and good company, will be beneficial to sales. You see much the same in current advertising when every product, however loosely linked, seems to advertise itself based on its environmental friendliness.
Being controversial deliberately is less effective than merely being controversial. Benetton was clearly looking for a public reaction to their commercials. They knew full well that images likely to cause an outcry, or be banned, would ultimately lead to more free coverage and publicity. It was smart advertising.
Overkill Leads To Ennui
When was the last time you really noticed a Benetton advert? Regardless of the images they use, it’s just another commercial for a clothing company. Maybe that’s their biggest failure. In seeking to be controversial and powerful they’ve overplayed their hand. Exaggerated though it might have been, they did have shock value, and now they’ve lost it. Being controversial is like being cool. If you have to try, you aren’t.
