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Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Retro Article of The Week: Shock And Awe Makes An Impression

For this week's Retro Article, we go back to September 15th, 2008.  On this day in history, the largest bankruptcy filing in US history occured when Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  This was one of the many financial institutions that fell because of the impact of the Great Recession.  In happier news, The NonProfit Times published their September 15th issue, which contained the following article about controversial ad campaigns:

A poster featuring a busty, D-cup model will turn heads. Couple it with a precocious, pig-tailed face of a little girl and it will stir an Internet frenzy.


That's what happened to The United Way of Greater Milwaukee's (UWGM) statutory rape awareness campaign when the faces of adolescent girls were imposed on full-figured, adult female bodies. But before the campaign could launch, the ad images leaked on the Internet and the campaign was tossed, even though the ads tested well in focus groups.


"It was obvious that the ads were being misconstrued," said Nicole Angresano, the community impact associate director for UWGM. Angresano said that changes were made to the images and text and the leaked versions represented earlier design prototypes.


"If we were to move forward, those were not the versions they would have seen," said Angresano, who explained that the ads were created to discourage adult men from having sex with under-aged girls.


Some 71 percent of babies born to teen girls in Wisconsin are fathered by adult males older than 20. In 20 percent of those cases, the fathers are at least six years older than the mothers, according to the Wisconsin Subcommittee on Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention study. The UWGM assumes that the statistics have stayed relatively the same since 1998, through case studies and anecdotal evidence from law enforcement, said Angresano. A new study is under way but results have not yet been released.


If you wish to read the full article, simply head on over to NPT's back-issue archive.

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