Sony Canada has pulled a Killzone 2 ad campaign in Toronto after the company received complaints that the large “menacing head with glowing eyes” was frightening children.
About 300 large posters for Killzone 2 were pulled from Toronto bus shelters after complaints were filed over the violent imagery contained in the ad. The first complaint came from Davis Mirza, a teacher from the Scarborough suburb of Toronto, who emailed Sony Canada after seeing the ad posted in a shelter near his school.
“My kids, who come from a lot of different countries, who have to experience violence, who basically come here to seek shelter and safety, that’s the stuff they don’t need to see,” he said. “I don’t think that when you’re in Scarborough, where we’re having to deal on a constant basis with violence, that does anything to help promote any kind of community renewal or even responsibility.”
Sony removed the ad after receiving the complaint, said company spokesman Kyle Moffatt, and then took down ten more at the request of Toronto City Councillor Pam McConnell due to similar complaints from another part of the city. Soon after, the company decided to pull all the remaining posters. “They were coming down at the end of the week,” Moffatt said. “We just asked them to speed up the process.”
Moffatt added that even though Sony Canada doesn’t control specific locations for the ads, it will establish an “off-limits radius” around school zones in future advertising campaigns for similar products.
Source: TheStar.com
