Dairy Ad Reference to Schizophrenia Altered after Public Outcry
Canoe.com (Canada) July 14, 2002
OTTAWA (CP) -- A television ad for cheese featuring an off-the-cuff remark about
schizophrenia has been altered after a public outcry, even though Canada's
advertising watchdog has deemed the commercial inoffensive.
Dairy Farmers of Canada, the ad's creators, initially refused to pull the ad
after receiving complaints from the public. But the organization later relented
and removed a segment in which a taxi-cab passenger calls the driver a "schizo."
"We were quite pleased with the outcome," said Joan Montgomery, chief executive
officer of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada, whose Ontario chapter lodged the
initial complaint earlier this year.
"It was serious enough that a great many Canadians were concerned and they
acknowledged that."
A spokeswoman for the Quebec-based Dairy Farmers of Canada said no one was
available last week to comment on the decision.
The dairy group edited the ad, part of its "Say Cheese" series of commercials,
in which an actor, posing as a taxi driver, offers a plate of cheese to a real
passenger in front of a hidden camera.
The passenger -- apparently in reference to the driver's strange behaviour --
calls the cab driver a "schizo."
Despite the decision to change the commercial, Canada's ad watchdog ruled the
segment was inoffensive after receiving a private complaint earlier this year.
Janet Feasby, a spokeswoman for industry-run Advertising Standards Canada,
refused to comment Friday on the complaint or the board's decision.
Feasby said all decisions by the body are kept private unless an ad is deemed to
violate a Canadian standard.
Montgomery said the ruling was clearly out of step with public opinion on the
issue of schizophrenia.
"They didn't feel it was necessary to step in," she said of the ad watchdog.
It's not the first time the agency -- the only recourse for complaints about
advertising in Canada -- has made decisions that differ from the advertisers it
represents.
In 2000, 20th Century Fox changed a series of television and newspaper
advertisements for the Jim Carrey film, Me Myself and Irene, which featured a
character with the disease.
Public outcry in the U.S. and Canada prompted the movie giant to remove slogans
such as "From Gentle to Mental" and remove the word "schizo" from the ads and
from posters appearing in bus shelters and on billboards.
Advertising Standards Canada later deemed the television ads for the movie
inoffensive, even after the broadcaster Teletoon removed them from the air.
Montgomery said the two cases are evidence that only public pressure gets
results.
"It was a good example of democracy in action," she said. "In the end the
advertiser acknowledged there was a need for compromise."
Thomas Quigg, a retired Ontario provincial police officer who initially
complained to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission,
Canada's broadcast regulator, about the dairy ad, said he's happy the ad has
been changed.
But he added he was angered by the written response from the Ad Standards staff,
who argued said the word used in the ad was "schizoid" not "schizo," and that
since the passenger who used it was a psychologist, it was therefore
inoffensive.
"They just didn't get it -- they said it was all in fun."
Quigg argued the system for complaining about advertisements in Canada is
flawed, after the commission forwarded his complaint to the Ad Standards board
without his permission.
The board then instructed him not to discuss their response with anybody, or
they would stop their investigations, he said.
"They told me it was copyrighted, that I can't discuss it, that as soon as you
contact anyone about it they shut up like a clam," he said.
Source:
http://www.canoe.ca/NationalTicker/CANOE-wire.Schizophrenia-Ad.html
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