The Circuit Factory ad featured image of Auschwitz with words 'Kiss your calories goodbye.'
A Dubai gym's promotional campaign that used an image of a Nazi concentration camp has ignited a firestorm of criticism.
The picture shows train tracks leading to Auschwitz, where millions of Jews were murdered, along with the words "Kiss your calories goodbye." The tasteless ad was one in a series of 10 photos posted on Facebook.
Phil Parkinson, founder of The Circuit Factory gym, has since removed the ad and issued apologies on Facebook and Twitter.
Parkinson tweeted that "the guy who created it isn't with us any more."
Reaction on social media, however, was predictably harsh.
"What the HELL Circuit Factory thinking when they launched this campaign?" tweeted rachelannmorris.
"The circuit factory epic fail ad. Apparently you lost your brain while trying to lose weight. #GoDie," tweeted AlisonLehr, along with an image of the ad.
"To use images of any genocide to advertise a product is, at best, almost unbelievably inept," Alexander McNabb, head of Spot On Public Relations in Dubai, told The Media Line.
Inept or not, the use of the offensive ad apparently paid dividends - Parkinson said the controversy has been great for business.
"A huge number people have researched or Googled ... our YouTube channel has shot up, our group page has got an hundred extra members in minutes and we have had about five times as many enquiries as before," he told arabianbusiness.com. "It has got to the point I am nervous that I can't cater for demand."
The Anti-Defamation League acknowledged Parkinson's apology, but also expressed its displeasure in a statement: "We are increasingly troubled by both the ignorance and mindset of a generation that appears to be so distant from a basic understanding of the Holocaust that it seems acceptable to use this horrific tragedy as a gimmick to bring attention to promoting losing weight."
Your collective inability to acknowledge this obvious truth makes you all look like fools.
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké
Yeah, that was probably not the very best of ideas. Undoubtedly, some ad manager green-lighted it saying it was "bold and edgy."
But beyond the utter tastelessness of using Auschwitz to sell anything, its greatest sin is that it's just a terrible ad. What's the message? Who is Circuit Factory? Why are they apparently setting up shop in Auschwitz? How does any of this make any kind of sense? You're sending your calories to Auschwitz? On a train? To be gassed/infected with typhus? WTF?
loCAtek wrote:It's even worse than that; this gym is in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; someone isn't just being tasteless, but down right racist.
So the location makes it Racist? If you're going to take that Tact I'd say it's progressive since it's taking the approach that the Holocaust actually happened.
Okay... There's all kinds of things wrong with what you just said.
Well, yes I'm assuming that an Arab country is filled with Arabs, and that the reason maybe they made the asscoiation of caleries being as undesirable as jews, was because of a bit of underlying tension between the two tribes, otherwise known as racism?
