A television ad for a car company has created a battle between hunting interests and animal welfare groups, but as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium ’s Jonathan Ahl reports, only one side’s voice is being heard:
Transcript
A television ad for a car company has created a battle between hunting interests and animal welfare groups. But as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports, only one side’s voice is being heard:
Toward the end of the past football season, the Jeep company ran a TV ad that featured hunters admiring two seemingly dead deer tied to the roof of a Jeep. The vehicle’s owner then drives into an area marked with a sign that says “no hunting zone.” He unties the deer, which are not dead, and they leap to safety. Within hours, Jeep’s parent company Daimler-Chrysler was inundated with calls from hunting groups and National Rifle Association members complaining the ad was unfair. Jeep pulled the ad and it hasn’t run since. Kelly Whitley is an NRA spokesperson. She says the company did the right thing:
“We don’t think it reflected hunters accurately, and we felt it really didn’t do anything for the corporation, and certainly, as far as our members were concerned. They weren’t interested in buying a jeep after they saw the ad.”
But once word spread that the ad was pulled,
animal welfare and rights groups including People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals and the ASPCA sent out emails to their members
encouraging them to call a toll-free number where a poll was underway on
whether to restore the ad. When people called the line, they received this
automated message:
“If you would like to register your comments about the Jeep Deer Hunter
Ad, please press one.”
(phone beep)
“If you are satisfied with the commercial and would like to see it
continue running, please press one.”
(beep)
(automated message sound continues under)
While it appeared to be a poll concerning the ad, the information was not being collected and passed on to Jeep. Daimler Chrysler hires an outside firm to handle its customer relations phone calls. That company took it upon itself to set up the automated system to deflect callers wanting to complain about the ad, so that other customers with questions about their Jeeps could get through to live operators. Daimler Chrysler spokesperson James Kenyon says the company was never authorized to set up the fake poll. He says Jeep is not considering putting the ad back on the air. He says the company wants to sell Jeeps, not create a debate on hunting:
“The ad was intended to do one thing, and people saw something else that was not intended to be there. We have even heard from people who felt that since that ad ran, we should run a pro-hunting ad. Well, that misses the point again.”
While Kenyon says Jeep will not take a stand in a debate on hunting, he does acknowledge that hunters make up a substantial part of the company’s customer base. The automated poll was taken down about an hour after our interview with Kenyon. Animal welfare and rights groups, meanwhile, say Jeep had an opportunity to sell their product in a positive way, but were bullied by hunting interests. Karen Coangelo is a spokesperson for the ASPCA:
“I think some corporations are worried about any bad PR being bad for business. And obviously that is how jeep feels in this situation. I don’t think they are specifically NOT looking at what people are saying about the ad itself, I think they are just worried about business in general, which is somewhat unfortunate.”
Coangelo says she’s disappointed that Jeep listened to the concerns of the hunters more than the concerns of people interested in protecting animals. She also says the situation has been a learning experience. Coangelo says the ASPCA will do a better job of checking the validity of phone polls before calling on members to respond to them. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jonathan Ahl.