Cingularly Bad Taste: Twin Towers-themed billboard, 4th Avenue and 9th Street Subway Station in Brooklyn
This is outrageous! Outrageously outrageous! In fact, we are outraged!
In a city still reeling from the 9/11 attacks—an event so painful, there isn’t a bowl of cereal large enough to drown our sadness—Cingular has decided to put up this tasteless, insensitive billboard on an overpass on 4th Avenue in Brooklyn that shows the burning Twin Towers. This is wrong on so many levels, especially since so many of us New Yorkers were without cellular service on that dark day and could not speak to our friends and family members, regardless of our “whenever minutes” or roll-over plans!
What’s worse is that this isn’t the first time advertisers have exploited 9/11 to sell a sub-par product. Shouldn’t they know better by now?
We urge you to boycott Cingular! Mostly because Catherine Zeta-Jones is incrementally less hot than she used to be. (So, boycott Ocean’s 12, too!) This outrage cannot be ignored!
Update: An alert reader and concerned citizen tells us that Ms. Zeta-Jones flaks for T-Mobile, not Cingular. You can run, but you can’t hide, Catherine! So, boycott Cingular’s non-threatening, pansexual spokescreature, Pit-Pat!
24 replies on “low culture Exclusive: An Outrage Grows in Brooklyn!!!”
The ad on the F train stop in Brooklyn is so clearly not about the twin towers. What looks like flames coming from the 2 “towers” are the bars busting through the orange lining on the ad for emphasis. We have become so overly sensitive and politically correct, that we actually see things that aren’t there in order to have something to bitch about.
And Catherine Zeta-Jones is with T-Mobile, not Cingular.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s meant to be the Towers, either.
Ladies —
Could it be that this was meant “satirically?” I guess we’ll never know. Better to be on the safe side and assume it wasn’t.
1) Advertising is subliminal. They want gut reactions.
2) There is no such thing as “overly sensitive” when it comes to 9/11.
3) What’s wrong with being sensitive? Couldn’t we as a nation stand a little more sensitivity?
“What’s wrong with being sensitive? Couldn’t we as a nation stand a little more sensitivity?”
According to the election result, I’d say people don’t want to be sensitive. They want to lock up all the gay people, outlaw a woman’s control of her body and damn our senior citizen’s to remaining years in poverty.
There is no way those are the Twin Towers. No advertiser would be so obscure, since in fact the last two bars are part of the entire signal symbol, thus the bars are not even close to being the same height. There is no mention of the Towers, no picture, no pun, no allusion to flames.
This entry is a bit of a stretch. I think the entry itself is revealing about the mood of NYC and would not even need any prompting from Cingular.
Get a grip. That is not the twin towers.
sorry, can’t agree w/ you on this one. these are obviously not supposed to be the towers. i think anyone who’s ever checked their cell phone bars for reception can figure that out.
That is a icon that represents signal strength. It is on cell phones. Look at your cell phone and it will have that little symbol in the lcd. Sometimes on TV they show it over peoples heads, which IS NOT REAL! Just making a point. These ad people are very clever chappies. If you look at this ad in question, there are no tell – tale vertical lines that the twin towers have as windows, nor are there any little airplanes flying into the towers. Also they are not the same size. When the twin towers were still standing, they were the same size, which is why they called them the twin towers.
Sometimes when I make a fist with my arm, the crack looks like a butt, but it’s not a butt, but I still like to look at it and smile.
i work for cingular and thought this was hilarious.
🙂
If you squint and look really closely at the 2nd bar from the right, you can make out a smirking Osama bin Laden.
Get over it. This ad has nothing to do with 9/11, and even if it did… get over it.
Wow. As a New Yorker myself, I can tell you that you’ve gone off the deep end.
First of all, it doesn’t look like the twin towers. Second of all, those aren’t flames, but the top of the orange border it’s breaking through. And, most important, third of all, the most egregious insult to the memory of the people who died on 9/11, and of the still-smarting injury done to the Greatest City in the World, is the [re-]election of George W. Bush.
So, really, get over it.
I’m offended that Cingular’s ad agency couldn’t come up with something more creative than the old “raising the bar” concept. I’ve only seen that in about 8 trillion ads…
Either this is a not-terribly-clever parody of the mechanics of overreaction, or whoever thought of this “exclusive” is an idiot. Either way, doesn’t make you look all that good.
I thik the Catherine Zeta-Jones comment should be enough to let anyone know that this item is, in fact, satyrical. Laugh, don’t post arguing about it.
Whoa, hold on Matt! Maybe you’ve never used a cell phone and don’t recognize the signal strengh bars symbol.
But even so, the twin towers were the same height, and the second tower was hit down lower, and their not blue, and the caption says “raising the bar.”
Get a clue.
I think the fact that this item appears at lowculture.com should be a telltale sign that it’s satirical, dontcha think?
>>We urge you to boycott Cingular!
LOL! Check out the Google Ads at the top right.
Personally I like the graffitti that is located above the second bar from the left
If you see this billboard as towers burning something is seriously wrong with the way your brain processes information.
Has anyone noticed that the Cingular billboard near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel (Jersey side) has changed? The bars/towers remain, but the “flames” are gone. Did they blow away with the wind? Or am I just seeing things?
people responding do not understand what a logo means. if you still believe that our government had nothing to do with 911 then u got something coming to you… i seen this ad awhile ago and noticed it right away. that is the towers burning, if you dont agree then you must be a sheep b/c its all over the place. If it ain’t the towers then why did they start replacing all the billboards recently? wake up america your governement is fucking you in the ass beware of new world order 911 is nothing
shit, people. it’s satire.