Gruen banned ad.
Holy cow.
 
If you're not a Gruen Transfer watcher, I'll give you some context. The Gruen Transfer is a show about advertising, where advertising professions break down advertisements and discuss them by technique and strategy. Every week they do a segment called The Pitch, wherein they give two agencies a brief to 'sell the unsellable'. Usual topics will be "convince people that global warming is a good thing", "sell ice to eskimos" or "promote invading New Zealand amongst Australians".

This week, they chose "convince people that fat is good". If you've not seen a Pitch before, go to the Pitch website and take a look at the other ad. It's typical for the Pitch, and is the kind of stuff that has made me argue passionately for ditching the Pitch. I felt it useless, a fun gag but that's all. Now, once you've watched that, go here, watch this. It's the other ad, the one the ABC refused to air.

First off, this is powerful, confronting stuff. While I wasn't as shocked as some people might have been (I'm hard to shock) it's tough to watch. The Sydney Morning Herald reported there wasn't even 'shocked, nervous laughter' in the audience... which now that we've seen the ad we can tell is exactly right. It's not meant to provoke that. It's meant to provoke anger, it's meant to provoke dislike... and then attach those emotions to shape discrimination.

I think it's staggeringly well made, and the discussion afterwards is top notch. If the Pitch were more like this, I'd defend keeping it on the show. I've only ever seen one other ad on the Pitch as good as this one. (The "Australian Democrats" ad #2). Much as I dislike Russell, I'm with him on this ad. It's powerful, confronting and it took the brief seriously. I think it wins.