By David Topping

You’d think that CFRB and zig would have gotten it by now. Last fall, the increasingly irrelevant talk radio station hired the ad agency to pimp them out on the streets of Toronto with an ad campaign that centred around the phrase “We need to talk.” And talk we did: the company littered the city with illegal ads (including ones that asked, appropriately, “Is advertising getting out of control?”), and paid homeless people an exploitatively low amount, quite possibly so low that it was illegal, to carry signs asking “Should panhandling be illegal?” It was all pretty reprehensible stuff, but for some reason they’re ramping up the campaign again: according to the Post, zig is paying prostitutes to carry signs asking, you guessed it, “should prostitution be legal?” and “over the next few weeks, [zig] will be handing out hand sanitizer with the message: ‘Does the flu shot really work?’ and posting signs on public ashtrays that read: ‘Should smokers be denied healthcare?’” Haven’t we had enough?