Worst. Ad: Ever: "Belsen was a gas"

Controversial Cell Phone Ad Pokes Fun At Holocaust
Thursday September 13, 2007
CityNews.ca Staff
It was supposed to be a harmless advertisement for a telecommunications company, but all it ended up demonstrating was an advertiser's negligence and extremely poor taste.

The Solo Mobile ad, which Thursday hung high above the crowds inside Downsview Station, depicts a tearful woman wearing a series of buttons, one of which reads "Belsen was a gas," a reference to Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi concentration camp used during the Second World War.

CityNews was notified of the offensive ad by an angry viewer, who like many we spoke to, had little to say in favour of the tasteless display.

"I was pretty stunned when I saw it," said Jonathan Warren. "I thought, 'Whose oversight was this?'"

It's an oversight that was easy enough to make for the thousands of commuters who passed under the massive poster, but for Bell Mobility, which owns Solo Mobile, it was an unacceptable error in judgment and one their executives were quick to respond to by issuing the following statement:

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http://www.citynews.ca/news/news_14732.aspx

How could any business be this stupid? I just laughed in disbelief on reading this.

...though it's still in extremely poor taste.

...which is about (as far as I can tell) the weirdness of English tourists visiting death camps.

As for the ad itself, it's almost certainly an oversight. Of course it should be pulled, but it's kind of hard to imagine that the company is trying to telegraph an anti-Semitic message. I suspect that the prop people wanted some punk-rock badges to complete a look, and that's one they pulled out of the bin.

I suppose some ad honcho though he was being avant garde. How they let that get through, is beyond me.

that it sets a whole new level.

No Class.

I saw an ad for some cell phone company that talked about being "The Final Solution for Hitler's Communication Problems." Something like that. I think that one was worse than this one.