Snickers ad drives Alternet writer nuts!

Over at Alternet, Matt Tabbi hates the latest batch of Snickers ads. A lot. Cuckoo for Cocoa Ads. When Mars refuses to endorse Fair Trade chocolate, hate the ads! The commercials must have damaged the "Research" part of this journalists brain as he gets so many facts wrong.


See the snickers "president" ad here

From the article at Alternet:

But the thing that really irritates me about these ads is that they were directed by a Swedish shop called "StyleWar." First of all, no company should be named "StyleWar." That should be against the law, and the U.N., I think, should intervene when this order is violated. And certainly no company that is both named StyleWar and run by Scandinavians should be allowed anywhere near an NFL football game.

But what gets me about StyleWar is that it won its reputation on the strength of work it did for Ikea. Several of its Ikea ads, including a famous European spot called "Lamp," helped make the furniture giant the mightiest private company in the world (more people now read the Ikea catalogue than the Bible). That means that StyleWar has now been the chief creative force for two prominent multinational companies who have been attached to child labor and child slavery scandals.

While StyleWar has done a few Ikea ads, the Ikea "Lamp" ad which won the Grand Prix in Cannes Lions 2003 was created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Miami, Florida, USA and directed by Spike Jonze, California, USA, and aired all across the United States. Two 'facts' wrong, thanks for playing, try again while doing some research next time (perhaps here). ;)

Newsweek reported about the fabricated story that caused real damage;

The issue of child labor had just reached popular awareness in Europe in 1992 when IKEA was blindsided by a Swedish documentary. The film showed kids chained to weaving looms in Pakistan, and cited IKEA as a customer. The newly hired business manager for carpets, Marianne Barner, immediately terminated the Pakistani contract. Then she added a clause to all supply contracts forbidding child labor, and set off to Pakistan, India and Nepal to have a look around. On the advice of an activist with Save the Children in Stockholm, she hired a company to monitor suppliers in the region.

Nearly twelve years later people like Matt still harp on that child labor story, unaware of that contract clause. Ikea didn't stop there though;

IKEA needed to do more than skip from crisis to crisis. Executives sought out advice from UNICEF, the International Labor Organization and unions. In the autumn of 1999, Barner arrived at the New York office of a rather skeptical Alex Fyfe, senior adviser on child labor at UNICEF, who thought she had come begging for an endorsement. Instead, she listened closely as he explained that the best solution to child labor was to attack root causes, like poverty and lack of education. By the summer of 2000, IKEA had donated a half-million dollars to UNICEF to fight child labor in the carpet belt of India by setting up schools and other programs in 200 villages. "They are almost a model of what a company should do," says Fyfe.