Insurance company ‘pays’ for controversial Father’s Day ad

OUTsurance has blamed a junior employee for the “anti-black” Father’s Day social media advert that backfired on the company after it caused a furore on social media.

The controversial advert shows several collated video scenes, where men – purportedly fathers, who are mostly white – do a myriad of positive activities with their children to celebrate yesterday’s Father’s Day.

The video advert was captioned: “Happy #FathersDay to all amazing dads out there”. But Twitter users were scathing in their criticism of the insurance company for the advert, arguing the campaign was not representative of the country’s demographics.

Peter Cronje, head of marketing at the insurance company, acknowledged that the advert was “demographically inappropriate”, pointing the finger squarely at a junior employee for the “unintentional oversight”.

“This advert was created by one of our junior ladies in the social media department and I believe she made an innocent mistake. This is the first time we have had trouble with one of our ads because we make sure that they are representative of the country’s demographics,” Cronje said, shortly after removing the campaign from the company’s social media sites.

Asked whether he had seen and approved the advert before its publishing, Cronje said he hadn’t, before adding: “We give our social media employees some leeway to run campaigns in order to empower our young staff.”

However, social activist Yusuf Abramjee alluded to a similar Mother’s Day advert by OUTsurance, where all the women and children in it are white. “South Africa has been a democracy for 23 years now and for a company like OUTsurance to have an ad which is 99 percent white – I think there is one person of colour in that whole advert, if I’m not mistaken – I think it is a disgrace,” he asserted.

Cronje said he still had to discuss with his fellow executives on whether they will take down the Mother’s Day advert, adding that the company’s social media adverts do not undergo the same “stringent demographic” filtering as TV adverts do.