The folks at Data Cars, a London minicab company, must be tearing their hair out right now after they were blasted by Rape Crisis, a U.K. non-profit helping sexual assault victims, over this ad promoting their taxi service:
Data Cars
Some context: It rains a lot in Britain. It also rains unpredictably. You can leave your house in blazing sunshine only to find yourself sheltering from a chilly downpour an hour or so later. It's an island, so the weather just blows in unimpeded from the Atlantic. What Data Cars is going for here is a reminder about the experience virtually every British woman has had: Going out in a nice dress only to get dumped on from the skies later in the evening. Hence, taxis.
Yet Rape Crisis saw something else entirely in this ad, according to The Mail:
Katie Russell from the charity said: ‘The best case scenario, giving the company the benefit of the doubt, is that they're not aware of the associations that the image on this postcard conjures. ‘The worst case scenario is that they've knowingly used scare-mongering, sexist and victim-blaming imagery and messaging in a cynical marketing ploy.’
Perhaps Rape Crisis didn't see the back of the postcard, which looks like this:
Data Cars
Yet somehow, a lot of people are seeing what they want to see in the ad, according to South London's News Shopper:
Twitter user John Traynor wrote: "Hello @datacars, just seen your ad on a postcard; is it saying: 'Pay for a cab or you might be dis-robed and beaten'?"