All Roads Lead to China: Business News, Analysis, and Insights from China

Marketing Managers, PR companies, and Advertising Executives take note, using images from 9/11 as part of an advertising campaign is not cool and will not have effects that  would be considered to build loyalty.

In this case of BRAiNDamage, BenQ has superimposed the lead singer from MayDay (HK band) holding their latest dogtag MP4 in front of what what was a column of World Trade 1.

As covered on Gizmodo, Digg, Danwei, and SCMP, there have been some who have taken issue with the new campaign (only release in mainland China/ HK), and the company has now told international mangers to be more careful and “sensitive”.

When managers of this campaign thought it was ok to release a campaign like this only in China, but not in the U.S., that should have been a red light for executives at BenQ. … after all, the internet is a global phenominon and thanks in part to airplanes, people from the U.S. are able to travel quite compfrtably to almost anywhere in the world in a matter of hours.

Moral to the story: using images from 9/11, tsunami, or any other disaster (an made and otehrwise) is off limits in the corporate world where exploiting a disaster for dollars has yet to make the transition from crude to cool.