KISSING HITLER

Further Führer furore…

With shock value almost a redundant commodity; it’s jimmy hats off to award-winning German ad agency Das Comitee for managing to create such a stir with their latest Aids awareness campaign. No beating around the bush here as a series of posters – and a sexually explicit TV ad – depict a series of dictators getting it on accompanied by the slogan “Aids is a mass murderer”, all linked to a scary horror-flick inspired website totting up the death toll.

Alongside the inspired image of Adolf doing it doggystyle (above) – one suspects Max Mosley has a huge blow-up of this already commissioned for his porn dungeon – there’s the almost resigned air of a failed Bee Gee to Saddam Hussein’s missionary zeal; while Stalin looks more like a heavily moustachioed Trevor Eve (in character as Peter Boyd) giving Sarah Harding his best shot.

It’s inevitably inspired a sustained bout of liberal handwringing – suggesting the ads only add to the stigma of the virus and offer no protection advice – yet such protestations merely reinforce its potency. Aids has slipped off so many radars and unsafe sex is almost de rigueur – these ads bring it sharply back into focus. As its creative director Dirk Silz noted: “We knew the face we gave to the illness could not be a pretty one.” Job brilliantly done. 

It also got me thinking about how much campaigns have changed with the times since the big disease with a little name impinged on modern life forever.

A 1984 HIV prevention poster for the Terrence Higgins Trust (produced soon after HTLV-III was identified as the virus that causes Aids). Factual, clean, and with a no-nonsense message, but blink and you could miss it.

Anyone at school in the ’80s will recall a barrage of improbable rumours and likely causes of Aids (not to mention a series of disparaging acronyms). This stark 1988 Canadian effort was part of a concerted campaign to dispel such mischievous myth-making.

Protection soon became the principle focus of campaigns, like this almost book-ish American condom ad from the back of male porn mag Mandate.

Although personally I’m a bigger fan of this 1995 National Lottery pastiche.

Posters have increasingly targeted specific groups, such as this 1998 effort at increasing the visibility of HIV positive Asian men.

Though shock tactics like this South African number (oddly in the same typeface once favoured by Eazy-E) still resonate harder.

And Das Comitee aside, no-one does this with less subtlety than the French.