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UNICEF commissioned an ad to resensitise viewers to the effects of war on children, by showing the bombing of the Smurf village. If you have QuickTime, you can judge the results for yourself over at Ads of the World. Rosa Brooks penned an interesting op-ed in the Los Angeles Times (registration required):

‘We see so many images that we don’t really react anymore,’ explained Julie Lamoureux of Publicis, the ad agency that created the spot for UNICEF. ‘We wanted to show adults how awful war is by reaching them within their memories of childhood.’

But as Brooks observes, the resulting debate has not been about the horrors of war, but the desecration of kitsch:

At CNN, for instance, Daryn Kagan wondered on ‘Live Today’ if UNICEF was ‘going too far.’ On ‘Newsnight,’ Anderson Cooper remarked: ‘Sure, it’s for a good cause. … Seems like a brutal message, though.’

Satire is turning in its grave. Brooks continues:

So if images of dead Smurfs offend us, it’s not because they evoke images of dead humans or shock us out of any genuine innocence. It’s because they force us to confront our own hypocrisy, our willful preference for the saccharine world of kitsch over the terrifying world of genuine human feeling.

(Hat tip: Sudan: The Passion of the Present: ‘Killing Smurfs for a better world (by Rosa Brooks)’.)

The Smurf video is a waste of a slot. Rather than failing (again) to shock us with the effects of war on children, UNICEF should have tried to show us how we are responsible for ‘collateral damage’ and how we can stop it, or at least how we can make life better for its victims.

Yahoo News reports that Google has started buying up print advertising and selling it on to its advertising customers, adding timely evidence to John Gruber’s argument that Google is fundamentally an advertising company. However, Gruber also suggests that it is a serious threat to newspapers:

Google may or may not become a direct threat to Microsoft in the future, but in the here and now, the entrenched monopolies that ought to feel threatened by Google are newspapers. Newspapers, especially local small- and medium-market newspapers live off the revenue from classified ads. But because most towns have only one major newspaper, classified ad prices are artificially high. Google is primed to burst into this market, with targeted local ads that are cheaper for advertisers and easier for users to find what they’re looking for or interested in.

This may well be true in the long term, but so long as large numbers of people continue to read printed materials, there will be people who want to advertise to them. It looks like Google is positioning itself as an efficient middleman between small companies and print media (Yahoo News again):

Google is betting it can exploit its relationship with hundreds of thousands of small businesses that already advertise online by its search results. The idea is to help advertisers gain exposure in the offline world at cheaper rates, or with less effort, than they otherwise could have.

So, in the short run, newspaper advertising revenues might actually rise. Meanwhile, The Onion reveals Google’s innovative solution for the information it can’t index.

Update (2 September 2005, 10.09 p.m.): I missed this when it came out, but apparently Google’s already offering a revolutionary content blocker (via Gerd Riesselmann: Notes From The Bog).