Toronto, Canada- CityTV News Reports
It was supposed to be a harmless advertisement for a telecommunications company, but all it ended up demonstrating was an advertiser's negligence and extremely poor taste.
The Solo Mobile ad, which Thursday hung high above the crowds inside Downsview Station, depicts a tearful woman wearing a series of buttons, one of which reads "Belsen was a gas," a reference to Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi concentration camp used during the Second World War.
CityNews was notified of the offensive ad by an angry viewer, who like many we spoke to, had little to say in favour of the tasteless display.
"I was pretty stunned when I saw it," said Jonathan Warren. "I thought, 'Whose oversight was this?'"
It's an oversight that was easy enough to make for the thousands of commuters who passed under the massive poster, but for Bell Mobility, which owns Solo Mobile, it was an unacceptable error in judgment and one their executives were quick to respond to by issuing the following statement:
"We are in the process of removing all of these particular Solo Mobile ads... running these ads was an error on our part and one we certainly regret. You won't see them again of course."
As for Warren, he says Bell's course of action is the only one possible, though it doesn't change his view of the company.
"I would hesitate to say that it's sending an anti-Semitic message," Warren continued. "What it's sending is that the corporations that have put that out there are pretty unobservant."
As of Thursday there were 51 of the ads around Toronto and Vancouver, all of which Bell promised would be removed by Thursday's end.
By Citytv News
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