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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
Can a company successfully sue an agency for making a commercial that really, really sucks? Stay tuned for a word from our courthouse.
May 28, 1999 | Last fall, when Just for Feet CEO Harold Ruttenberg learned his company had nailed down a coveted time slot for a third-quarter Super Bowl ad, the sneaker mogul could hardly contain his jubilation. Though a public corporation with over $775 million in annual sales, ranked No. 6 in Fortune magazine's recent list of "America's Fastest Growing Companies," Just for Feet had never before tried its hand at national brand advertising. "We specialize in selling shoes, not commercials," Ruttenberg says. "We had never before created hoopla." Now, here was a chance to burnish Just for Feet's corporate reputation and brand image on a national scale. He says he couldn't wait to tell viewers about the footwear chain's friendly atmosphere, its neighborliness, its reputation for social responsibility. "We're a family type of retailer that caters to a family atmosphere," he says. "We've got shoes we sell. We've got a public that we love. It's a very dynamic atmosphere we have in our stores. Here was an opportunity to tell our story to the largest audience in the world."
The hoopla, as Ruttenberg would soon learn, didn't come cheap. Four months later, by the time the spot was beamed out to an estimated 127 million households, Just for Feet had wagered almost $7 million on the game -- $1.7 for the media buy, $3 million to hire an ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi Business Communications of Rochester, N.Y., and an additional $2 million to take out newspaper ads in every market in which it did business, alerting shoppers and franchise owners to Just for Feet's third-quarter Super Bowl triumph, and reminding them to keep their eyes peeled. Ruttenberg thought the expense was worth it. As he saw it, the ad would bring about a groundswell of public goodwill. "What we were looking to do was to start to build our brand," he told me. "What we wanted was for people to see this and say, 'Boy, that was terrific. Now we're customers of yours. We want to shop with you.'"
Chuck McBride, creative director at Wieden, Kennedy and lead creative on the Nike account, remembers his reaction on the evening of Jan. 31, when he first saw the Just for Feet ad. "The minute I saw it, I immediately went 'Oh, shit,' and I went, 'This can't go on.' I just couldn't believe that they had done this."
The ad opens with a shot of white men in a military Humvee tracking the footprints of a barefoot black Kenyan runner. The men drive ahead to offer the runner a cup of water laced with a knockout drug. The runner drinks the water, and immediately collapses to the ground, unconscious. While he is passed out, the white men force a pair of Nikes on his feet. When the runner awakens, he sees the sneakers and begins shouting and flailing. "No! No!" he cries. He then scrambles to his feet and runs away, still trying to shake the shoes from his feet.
Chuck McBride wasn't the only person who hated the ad. "Appallingly insensitive," declared Stuart Elliott in the New York Times. Writing in Advertising Age, Bob Garfield called the ad "neo-colonialist ... culturally imperialist, and probably racist. Have these people lost their minds?" The Des Moines Register, expressing incredulity at the fact that "Just for Feet would spend millions of dollars to come up with something that makes Denny's and Texaco look like abolitionists," suggested a name change for the athletic footwear chain: "Just for Racists." As punishment, the paper suggested in an editorial, "the ad agency who signed off on the commercial should be required to come up with a campaign that shows the worst about their own cultures. Then they should be drenched in a bucket of water, made to fall on their backs, and shackled."
Harold Ruttenberg had a better idea. On March 15, 1999, Just for Feet sued Saatchi and Saatchi for $10 million, arguing the Super Bowl commercial was so bad it amounted to advertising malpractice. "Saatchi & Saatchi assured Just for Feet that the commercial Saatchi conceived and produced would be well received by the public," reads the complaint, filed in federal district court in Birmingham, Ala. "Instead, as a direct consequence of Saatchi's appallingly unacceptable and shockingly unprofessional performance, Just for Feet's favorable reputation has come under attack, its reputation has suffered, and it has been subjected to the entirely unfounded and unintended public perception that it is a racist or racially insensitive company." Far from glorifying the company's role in advancing civilization and promoting social betterment, Just for Feet argues, the ad creates the impression that the footwear retailer is "racist, culturally insensitive and condescending, [and] promotes drugs." This impression, the company states in its complaint, "is contrary to the deepest held principles of Just for Feet, which has always sought to promote racial harmony, finds racism abhorrent, and condemns drug use."
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