Saatchi gets the boot over the use of a dead rock star in advertising
LONDON: Dead celebrities are hot. From Einstein to Elvis and Gene Kelly to Orville Redenbacher, they keep popping up as posthumous pitchmen for everything from cars to cola. But when Saatchi Saatchi London recently featured images of Kurt Cobain and other dead rock stars in ads for Dr. Martens footwear, the agency and its client got burned.
Courtney Love, Cobains widow, went ballistic when she heard about the ads, which ran in a small British music magazine called Fact. One of the ads shows Cobain, who was the lead singer of the band Nirvana, sitting on a cloud in the sky, draped in robes and shod in Dr. Martens boots.
“She thinks its outrageous that a company is allowed to commercially gain from such a despicable use of her husbands picture,” a spokeswoman for Love told People magazine.
It was hardly the first time that Cobains image had been used for commercial gain. According to Forbes magazine, which compiles a list of the earning power of dead celebrities, Cobain came in first last year, just ahead of Elvis Presley, reeling in $50 million for his estate.
In this case, however, what started out as a legitimate use of the photo of Cobain, along with images of Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, Joey Ramone of the Ramones, and Joe Strummer of the Clash, went wrong because of a series of missteps and the border-hopping power of the Internet.
Saatchi said it found the images in the Corbis photo library and obtained copyright clearance to use them in Britain.
The trouble began when an employee - disobeying instructions, Saatchi insisted - submitted the images to www.adcritic.com, a U.S.-based ad industry Web site. In the United States, the estates of dead celebrities are allowed to control the use of their images, unlike in Britain, where, lawyers say, no approval is needed.
A spokeswoman for Saatchi, Eleanor Conroy, said the employee who was responsible for the breach had been dismissed.
“While we believe the creative is a beautiful tribute to four legendary musicians, the individual broke both agency and client protocol in this situation by placing the ads on a U.S. advertising Web site and acting as an unauthorized spokesperson for the company,” Kate Stanners, executive creative director at Saatchi Saatchi London, said in a statement.
Sending ads to sites like AdCritic is common, particularly when an agency or ad executive is trying to “seed” it so that it can spread “virally” on the Internet. Creative types like to do this in order to generate chatter about their ads, which is helpful when awards season rolls around. Clients rarely complain, because they get free advertising.
In this case, however, Airwair International, the British company that makes Dr. Martens, was not impressed. It canceled its contract with Saatchi Saatchi, reportedly worth 5 million, or $9.9 million, over three years.
David Suddens, chief executive of Airwair, said Saatchi first approached his companys marketing department in February with sketches outlining the idea for the ads.
“We said firmly, no way, ” he said.
But dead celebrities are trendy in advertising at the moment. Gene Kelly appeared in a recent British ad for Volkswagen; a digitally generated likeness of Orville Redenbacher starred in U.S. ads for the eponymous popcorn brand.
Suddens said Saatchi wanted to give the idea another try, developing the sketches into proposed ads, and showed them to Airwair in April. Agency executives said they wanted to have the images published at least once so that they could be submitted for awards, he added. An Airwair executive finally agreed to allow the ads to be used in Britain only, and only in Fact magazine, Suddens said.
The company has apologized to Love, and Suddens said he was unmoved by Saatchis argument that the use of the ads was legitimate in Britain. “Enough people said it was offensive for us to consider it offensive,” he said.
Airwair has focused its marketing on a campaign called “Freedm,” featuring a Web site that invites would-be rock stars and other artists to post their creations.
Many marketing executives have been wary of user-generated content, fearing the loss of the editing function that ad agencies provide. In this case, however, it was the pros who got their clients in trouble.
Eric Pfanner can be reached at adcol@iht.com.
