Saturday, January 27, 2007

Do You Think I Need A Breast Reduction?

And other "edgy" ads promoting Toronto as a tourist destination...

City councillor Michael Thompson calls them garbage, but they seem reasonably funny to me. The example below seems to have caused the biggest uproar:


But this one is my favorite:

The posters are destined for alternative weekly newspapers in the U.S., and are supposed to "break perceptions that Toronto is a bland, uninteresting city".

Of course having the ads pulled will just reinforce that impression, as well as raising suspicions that we're all a bunch of prudes up here. And god knows what kind of message would be sent to potential American tourists if they ever went ahead with Thompson's best known proposal: allowing police to search black men at random.

That would surely play well around Caribana time.

5 comments:

CQ said...

_Culture, possibly. Cultural Diversity, not so evident. These ads seem about as modern as last year's 'Vancouver ice fishing' Winter Olympic appearance at Torino.
_Whatever happened to uTu - united Toronto unlimited, and/or the multi-scoop ice cream cone design?

Anonymous said...

Interesting that the leftist city council would use sexual innuendo as a selling point to attract tourists?

bigcitylib said...

Actually, I see absolutely no sexual innuendo in those ads, other than the implication that Torontorians don't do French kink very well (the fourth one). Mostly self-deprecating humor.

Anonymous said...

SUSPICIONS that you're a bunch of prudes in Toronto?

Well I can't comment on the average Torontonian, since I haven't met that many, but your politicions and civil servants seem to fit that description aptly. Banning Barenaked Ladies because of the group's name...banning Miss Universe from appearing in Nathan Philips Square last year because beauty pageants were "sexist"...

Although I must admit that it is comforting to see other civic officials as nutty as the ones we have in Vancouver (and yes, the "Nuclear Free Zone" signs are indeed back up)...

Bruce

Saskboy said...

Amusing ads those two posters. Not sure I'd figure out they were for Toronto though.