A Nike print ad
making the rounds on the Web this week is causing a stir
for its homophobic copy, which reads, "The only thing worse
than going to the ballet is going to the ballet to see
your son."
But unlike
previous ads that raised eyebrows among gays for their
homophobic content -- a la that Snickers Super Bowl ad
that featured two men appalled when
they accidentally kiss after eating
through the candy bar from opposite ends -- this ad
wasn't commissioned by Nike.
In fact, Nike
says the company didn't even know about the ad until it
popped up on the Web.
The Nike ad in
question ran in CMYK Magazine, a publication distributed quarterly to advertising and
design professionals, as part of a quarterly student ad
design competition.
Students Nicolas
Schmidt-Fitzner and Tara Lawall created the mock-up
under instructors Niklas Fing-Rupp and Jan Rexhausen. They
attend one of the Miami Ad School's satellite
locations in Hamburg, Germany.
The ad was
selected by a "leading professional" in the
advertising industry as one of the best ads submitted for
the quarter. Student projects in areas of art
direction,copywriting, design, illustration, and
photography appear in each issue of the magazine.
CMYK publisher Curtis Clarkson said he was
first contacted last week via e-mail with a complaint about
the ad. That was quickly followed by postings on blogs
and a call from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation.
Clarkson
responded with a letter to GLAAD posted on the
organization's blog, apologizing to anyone "who takes
personal offense by the publishing of this class
assignment."
"In retrospect,
I'm not surprised [by the response] -- but I see so
much student work that uses risque, biting humor,"
Clarkson told Advocate.com in an exclusive interview.
"Not all the time, but with sports clients and energy
drinks ... We scrutinize the work to a degree, but we
never censor it because we figure, this is what the judge
picked; we have to go by their word."
Clarkson says he
personally might not have selected the ad, but he also
says he took the ad in a different way, thinking "they're
trying to pit macho sports against ballet, trying to
get out the point that Nike is for hard-core sports."
He says that when
he received the first e-mail, he thought the sender was
"kind of equating homosexuality with ballet dancers. There
are a lot of straight ballet dancers, so I didn't see
it that way."
After more calls
and blog posts started coming his way, he says he took a
harder look at the ad and quickly understood what all the
fuss was about.
Because the
magazine is distributed to mostly industry professionals who
are familiar with what CMYK is, Clarkson says the
fact that the ad was reprinted on the Web out of
context made people think Nike had commissioned the
ad.
In addition to
writing a letter to GLAAD, Clarkson says he reached out to
Nike representatives who he says were "very gracious." He
wrote a letter to Nike explaining the
magazine's reasoning behind selecting the ad.
"This is quite a
lesson -- and it certainly was a humbling experience,"
Clarkson says. "I understand the frustrations."