Racist adverts: It didn't start with Volkswagen

The saying that bad publicity is good publicity may WORK for brands, but what if the bad publicity is racist?

Recently, social media was all the rage when German car manufacturer Volkswagen posted a racist video promoting its new Golf 8 on its official Instagram page.

According to CNN, in the already retracted video, a black man was seen pushed off a street from a parked VW Golf and onto the sidewalk by a white hand.

Then another giant hand took him by the head and pushed him toward a doorway, before flicking him into a restaurant called Petit Colon, which translates from French as the Little Colonist or Little Settler.

The 10-second ad generated criticism from social media users all over. Volkswagen (VLKAF) was then forced to apologize.

It said in a statement on Twitter, “We posted a racist advertising video on Volkswagen’s Instagram channel. We understand the public outrage at this. Because we’re horrified, too,” said Jurgen Stackmann, a member of Volkswagen brand’s board of management. “We’re ashamed of it and cannot explain how it came about.”

The company went further ahead to state, given its history, "it does not tolerate any form of racism, xenophobia or discrimination."

Racist Ads

But, the racist and controversial ads did not start with Volkswagen.

Over the years, there have been multiple examples of companies delivering terrible ad campaigns that have been the talk in the world for all the wrong reasons.

We take a look at some recent terrible commercial ads.

The retailer faced a huge backlash with people all over calling for a boycott of the brand.

In January 2018, famous clothing retail company H&M came under fire for posting a black child modelling a hoodie that said “coolest monkey in the jungle.”

The retailer faced a huge backlash with people all over calling for a boycott of the brand over the picture.

H&M responded and said: "We apologise to anyone this may have offended."

Dove Soap also fell victim to the worrying trend when in October 2017 it was forced to apologise for a 'racist' Facebook advertising campaign.

BBC reported that the ad displayed a series of "racist" images that appeared to show a black woman turning into a white person. Two images showed the black woman peeling off her T-shirt to reveal a white woman underneath her skin, and a third image showed the white woman undressing to reveal an Asian woman.

"We deeply regret the offense it caused,” the company would say.

The campaign sparked off a debate on social media with some people accusing the brand of racism and whitewashing.

In yet another unfortunate case, CNN reported that in 2016, a Chinese firm apologised for a racist laundry detergent ad, in which a Chinese woman threw a black man covered in paint into a washing machine. The man emerged from the machine as a clean, light-skinned Chinese man.

To promote one of their deodorants, Nivea, a German skincare brand decided to use the tagline “White is Purity” on their social media campaign in 2017.

The ad featured a woman wearing a white top while looking out the window with the slogan in bold blue letters. Critics said that the choice of words for this campaign was very poor. The campaign was targeted at its followers from the Middle East, which caused many people to call the advert racist, with comments about white supremacy.

Nivea eventually released a statement about the ad and immediately withdrew it after realising the wording and context was offensive.