‘Shock Ads’: New Rage That Spawns Rage : Marketing: Companies use the controversial campaigns to separate themselves from the crowd. But many are upset by images such as Benetton’s dying AIDS patient.

Some call it the most shocking photo ever used in an advertisement. A father, sister and niece agonize at a bedside where AIDS sufferer David Kirby--his eyes vacant--lies dying.

Missing from the picture is the young man’s mother. “I was in the other room, crying,” explained his mother, Kay, a cleaning woman at a Columbus, Ohio, church. “We had just been told he didn’t have much longer to live.”

Not missing from the picture is the name of the print ad’s sponsor: Benetton.

Consumers rarely see such stark images in news stories--let alone in ads aimed at selling products. The ad appeared in March issues of Vanity Fair, Vogue and Interview--and over the next three months it will appear in five more publications.

Some have accused Benetton of selling its sweaters off the backs of human suffering. But Kirby said the ad will satisfy her purpose if it results in one person changing his or her lifestyle--and not contracting acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Advertisers besides Benetton are chucking conventional marketing techniques and trying to jolt consumers into gazing at their ads. Some call it “shock advertising” and note that its intent is not necessarily to sell a product but to elicit attention for a brand name in the crowded consumer market.

Much like radio “shock jocks” who amass huge audiences by saying the unsayable, industry observers say shock advertising could change the way products are marketed in the 1990s. And maybe not for the better.

“Bad taste continues to escalate in the name of attention getting,” said Roberta Clarke, former chairman of the marketing department at Boston University. “And over time, bad taste can change the norms of a culture.”

These eye-opening ads are particularly popular among advertisers with budgets so tiny that they rely upon publicity to increase name awareness. Such ads are also favored by fashion designers, such as Benetton and Calvin Klein, whose images as leading-edge outfitters may be more crucial than the styles they create.

“If you outrage people, you can bust out of the clutter,” said Steve Hayden, creative chief of the agency BBDO/Los Angeles. “But you’re playing with nitroglycerin. You can also blow your hands off and create a hole in the ground that will take years to fill.”

Auto maker Volvo is running a series of graphic ads--showing mangled cars--that feature tales from survivors of horrific accidents. An ad campaign aimed at persuading blacks to quit smoking features an ominous Ku Klux Klansman. And a lingerie company says it may soon dot Los Angeles sidewalks with spray-painted ads that say, “From here, it looks like you could use some new underwear.”

“They all want to be considered as avant-garde,” said Stephen A. Greyser, professor of consumer marketing at Harvard Business School. “If you’re not in the avant-garde, you’re not in.”

Some of Madison Avenue’s most outspoken figures, who have at time been criticized for creating campaigns of questionable taste, say they have never seen anything like the current surge in shock ads.

“This is desperate advertising,” said Jerry Della Femina, whose agency Della Femina McNamee five years ago created the first condom commercial--which was rejected by all the networks. “The object of advertising is to get people to feel better about the product you’re selling. This stuff insults the intelligence.”

Della Femina suspects that the real aim of the Benetton AIDS ad is free publicity. While Benetton executives don’t deny that the ultimate aim of the company is to sell clothing--with sweaters that frequently retail for more than $100--they insist that this ad had a loftier goal.

“Yes, we mean to shock some people with our ads,” said Peter Fressola, a Benetton North America spokesman. “But people who are shocked by this ad have been living in a cocoon. They need to be shocked into seeing what’s really going on in the world.”

The AIDS ad appeared in a six-part series that also features an automobile fully ablaze after a car bomb went off. Yet another Benetton ad is an agonizing photo of a boatload of refugees who appear to be swarming into the water.

“Clearly the boundaries of good taste haven’t stopped these guys,” Della Femina said. “If this ad fails to shock enough people, where does it go from here? Ads with blood, dismemberment and hanging bodies?”

Such comments make Benetton executives bristle. “We believe that when that many people see an image this powerful, it can raise their collective consciousness,” Fressola said. “And that can result in action.”

The photo featuring the dying AIDS patient was originally published not as an ad but in Life magazine. “When it ran in Life, we didn’t hear from anyone,” said Kay Kirby, the mother of the AIDS victim in the Benetton ad. Benetton said it hopes that the ad will eventually be viewed by a billion people worldwide.

Kirby said her family--which accepted no compensation from Benetton--has received hundreds of phone calls and letters about the ad. A number of people told her that, since seeing it, they have decided to modify their lifestyles.

Concerned about the provocative ad, a self-regulatory organization in Britain tried to ban it. That group, the Advertising Standards Authority, condemned the companies that plan to publish it. By running it, the group said, companies would be “providing Benetton with a means to cause offense and distress.”

Since 1989--when Benetton ran a print ad outside the U.S. featuring a black woman nursing a white baby--it has been regarded as the renegade of advertising. The Italian-owned company, which has 6,500 stores in more than 100 countries, creates its own campaigns. It uses identical campaigns in each country and spends about $80 million to promote itself worldwide.

For years, Benetton has been making social statements in its ads that appeal particularly to young consumers. By simply buying Benetton clothing, some of these youthful customers believe, they are somehow helping to solve such complex issues as racial prejudice or even the spread of AIDS, Boston University’s Clarke said.

“Nobody sets out to have their advertising ignored,” said Benetton’s Fressola. “Perhaps we’re just too successful.”

Benetton was hardly the first to shock consumers into looking at its ads. What began in 1980 with Brooke Shields in a provocative pose for Calvin Klein jeans has escalated into fashion advertising that often looks like soft porn.

At least one ad executive speculates that Benetton--which saw its sales top the $2-billion mark last year--has been extremely successful. “I don’t think it matters what a bunch of middle-aged ad executives have to say about the campaign,” said Roger Livingston, chairman of the Seattle agency Livingston & Co., which creates the off-beat Alaska Airlines ads. “What is relevant is what 15-year-old girls have to say about it. And I think most kids probably say, ‘Right on!’ ”

That seems to be the aim of most shock advertising: appeal to narrowly defined target groups of consumers. For Benetton, the group includes shoppers like Katherine Hambleton, 18, an art student at Connecticut College.

“We’ve grown up with this kind of advertising, so it doesn’t faze us at all,” said Hambleton, who shopped in the Benetton store at Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza while on spring break. “The ads do make me aware of the company. But in the end, they don’t influence what clothing I buy. The biggest influence is who has something on sale.”

Jimmy Smith has shown his mother some shocking things over the years--most recently his pierced ear. But Smith, a black copywriter at the Los Angeles agency Muse Cordero Chen, gave his mother the shock of a lifetime when he showed her an anti-smoking ad he helped create.

The print ad, which warns that 50% of blacks will die of smoking-related diseases, features a haunting picture of a Ku Klux Klansman. The headline reads, “There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing a nigger smoke.”

“No. No. No. No. No,” said Smith’s mother, who was revolted by it. “You can’t do that.”

But with the help of art director Ed Segura, he did. “None of the regular ads were breaking through,” said Segura, who quit smoking 10 years ago. “We had to try slapping people in the face.”

The anti-smoking ad was so incendiary that the original client--the California Department of Public Health--not only rejected it, but directed the agency to destroy it. But agency executives--and some members of the Los Angeles black community--felt so strongly about the ad’s message that they paid for it to run in a magazine targeted toward upscale blacks.

The publisher of that San Francisco Bay Area magazine, Bayshore, said he has taken heat for running the ad but plans to run it again. “It’s not a matter of advertisers trying to out-shock each other,” Dan Johnson said. “I think they’re just dealing with reality.”

Reality has also hit the sidewalks of Manhattan. A tiny lingerie maker is spray-painting ads akin to graffiti that simply say, “From Here It Looks Like You Could Use Some New Underwear.” Next to that slogan is the name Bamboo Inc.

“If you don’t have the money to spend on a big campaign, this is what you have to do,” said Marie-Helene Miller, co-owner of Bamboo, which posted sales of $2.5 million last year. Miller and her partner spent $2,000 on the campaign. They hired what Miller calls “street kids” to rove around Manhattan, spraying the stenciled words in front of areas where young women shop.

Was the campaign legal? Not exactly, but when it rains, the evidence gets washed away, pointed out Richard Kirschenbaum, partner at the New York agency that devised the campaign, Kirschenbaum & Bond. (He said the paint is specially made not to harm the environment.) “If you’re Procter & Gamble, you don’t do this type of advertising,” Kirschenbaum said. “But if you’re an underdog, it pays to advertise in an underdog fashion.”

By summer, the campaign may be showing up on the sidewalks of Los Angeles--in conjunction with billboard ads, Miller said. “People in California have a different attitude,” Miller said. “I think they’ll be more accepting of this.”

Even Volvo has gotten into the act. The auto maker is running print ads featuring accident victims’ accounts of how they survived terrible crashes while driving Volvos. Each ad includes a small--but graphic--photo of the mangled Volvo.

“This is not a picture of someone in pain, dying or who looks like they’re just been in a car crash,” said Bob Austin, director of communications at Volvo. “This is our attempt to make the issue of safety more engaging and compelling.”

Recently, Austin received a call from a woman lying in a hospital bed in San Diego. She had been driving a Volvo that was involved in a head-on crash. It took emergency crews two hours to cut her--and her two children--out of the wreck.

Although the woman suffered 11 broken bones, her children emerged with only scratches. She told Austin that she was certain she would have been killed had she been driving something other than a Volvo.

Austin thanked her--and sent flowers. He also took her phone number. After all, he said, she may be the subject of a future advertisement.