Results tagged “zig”

Being a former child star can become a fate worse than death. Often exploited and then kicked to the curb when the cuteness wore off due to impending puberty, these former moppets spend their adult life trying to detach from the likes of Steve Urkel, Screech, Rerun, and Danny Partridge—and their characters' respective catchphrases.

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?

Photo by Michael Chrisman from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

zig Executive Creative Director Martin Beauvais, to The National Post about his company's totally repulsive bumvertising campaign for CFRB: "We didn’t pay [the homeless people] thousands or hundreds. We paid them the kind of money they would make on the street because it would have been wrong to do more than that. We paid them something decent." And: "I don’t think it’s exploitive at all because we’ve asked people if they wanted to do it and they agreed to do it. We presented them with the whole idea of what it was about. I don’t think it’s exploitive at all. It’s not more exploitive than putting a billboard on a building." Uhhhh...