Well, you know how we love a corporate kafuffle at CMU, so this is fun. According to New York website The Daily Swarm, footwear company Airwair Ltd, the maker of Dr Martens boots, have fired their London ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi after ads appeared online featuring four deceased rock icons, seemingly in heaven, wearing the company's shoes.
Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain, Joey Ramone and Joe Strummer are the four artists featured - the ad agency has seemingly taken existing photos of the rockers' faces and photoshopped them onto the bodies of angel like people who are wearing Dr Martens boots.
The images are from a UK only ad campaign and surfaced online earlier this week, leading to much blog based debate as to whether it was appropriate to use the images of such legendary musicians in this way, and the issuing of a statement from Courtney Love criticising the campaign and stressing she had not granted permission for Cobain's image to be used.
Despite some reports on the campaign in the British press carrying a quote from a Dr Martens spokesperson saying they had chosen the ads to "communicate that Dr Martens boots are 'made to last'", the shoe company have subsequently distanced themselves from the whole thing, issuing a statement saying they felt the campaign was inappropriate and accusing Saatchi of releasing the ad designs without their permission.
The Daily Swarm quote Airwair CEO David Suddens as saying: "Dr. Martens did not commission the work as it runs counter to our current marketing activities based on FREEDM, which is dedicated to nurturing grass roots creativity and supporting emerging talent". He added that the artwork should never have appeared in the public domain, saying that "as a consequence [of the release], Dr Martens has terminated its relationship with the responsible agency".
In a separate statement he also responded to Courtney Love's response to the Kurt Cobain ad by saying: "We do think that it is offensive. We made a mistake. My message to Courtney Love is this is something we shouldn't have been doing".
However, a spokesman for Saatchi says they were given approval to run the ads in the London based Fact Magazine as a one off promotion, although they admitted that one of their employees had also posted the artwork on a US website without client permission, and that that was a breach of "agency and client protocol". Despite that they stood by the integrity of the campaign, stressing that the four selected rock icons were all known to wear Dr Marten boots.