Music
Disturbed ad with parallels to Virginia on-air shooting pulled
by Richard Howard
August 27, 2015
The band's animated video features a massacre at a television station.
Early 2000s lite-metal giants Disturbed and their label, Warner Bros., have made the decision to pull a video ad for the band’s new album Immortalized due to some unfortunate parallels with the on-air shooting of Virginia television reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward.
While filming an on-location interview, the pair was fatally shot by Vester Flanagan, a former employee of the same station where the victims worked. The interviewee, Vicki Gardner, was taken to the hospital and is in stable condition while Flanagan later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Disturbed’s video for the single “The Vengeful One” certainly differs considerably (the gunman is Disturbed’s very non-human mascot ‘The Guy’ and his victims are largely robots and zombies). However, the fact that a large part of the animated massacre takes place in a television station and many of those being shot, human or not, are reporters means it was probably a good call on everyone’s part.
The marketing agency that placed the ad was sure to stress that they at no time tried to use the violence in the video as an advertising ploy and highlighted the fact that only Disturbed fans would have seen it had it remained up. Gupta Media founder Gogi Gupta explained: “The Disturbed ad was served via retargeting. Retargeting ads are matched to previous web-browsing behavior, so only a visitor who had interacted with Disturbed websites would be eligible to see this ad. The content of the video is irrelevant in this type of advertising because we know that they are Disturbed fans. There was no use of key words or any other kind of targeting for this particular ad.”
[h/t Blabbermouth]
