As an enthusiastic advertising fan, I cannot recall a greater impact made by a local advertising campaign!

Less than three weeks after the official opening of its first retail store in Floreal, most Mauritians today know about Benetton. In fact, in this very moment, I am myself contributing a fair share of free advertising space to their on-going brand awareness campaign. The controversy and public reaction they have managed to create with a single photograph put up on a few billboards is what any branding specialist dreams of! In football terms, this is what you may call an own goal?

Benetton's ads have always sparked controversy because of the underlying political and social messages they contain. The author of these themes is Milan-born photographer Oliviero Toscani who based on his close relationship with Chairman Luciano Benetton has a free reign on the company's massive advertisin budget since 1982. His creativity has always provoked debate and protest, all the while raising awareness of the Benetton brand. Some of their campaigns have even been banned in countries like France and Italy. In the early 1990?s, the French Bureau de Vérification de la Publicité and the Italian Advertising Authority banned posters which showed a black woman breast-feeding a white baby and another one depicting a priest kissing a nun. But there is a ?thick? line between controversy and official ban.

In the past, Toscani has used themes such as a deathbed scene of a man dying from AIDS, a bloodied, unwashed newborn baby with umbilical cord still attached, two horses mating, close-up pictures of tattoos reading ?HIV Positive? on the bodies of men and women, pictures of inmates on death row and the list goes on?. The company's logo usually is the only text accompanying the images in most of these advertisements. The common thread? A contradictory note of duality, the ?dividing line between two waters?: ?war/peace, flirtation/sex, beauty/pollution?, etc. The message is ambivalent, and leaves us free to come up with our own answers to the questions they raise. Before we can debate over which ban was justified and which one was unjustified, each poster and each campaign has to be put into its political, cultural, social and economic context. As Benetton put it: ?The purpose of advertising is not to sell more. It's to do with institutional publicity, whose aim is to communicate the company's values (...) We need to convey a single strong image, which can be shared anywhere in the world. ?Recently, Oliviero Toscani reacted to critics of his non-conformism by saying: ?I am not here to sell pullovers, but to promote an image?.

My point is that the local authorities are once again asking the wrong questions. We have all been caught in the advertiser?s psychological game. The very fact that we are debating over what is moral or not and what is sexual or not is why this campaign was created in the first place! In my opinion, comments made about Mauritians being sexual repressed are harsh, out of context and too generalised. It is a bare fact that the photograph of a woman straddling a man will be, more often than not, interpreted as sexually suggestive even in the absence of explicit nudity. But there is no way that this poster projects a negative image of women. What does the man on the poster represent then?

This is not the first time that local authorities ban a poster or an ad because of some ridiculously opaque and far-fetched reasons. Although we should remain ?politically correct? in whatever we say and do, we should not cowardly hide behind our moral or cultural assets and continue to think ?inside-of-the-box?. My advice to them is to get a satellite dish and have a look at the ads and shocking themes on there. Should we not ban satellite TV as well for the same reasons? Our political leaders are going on and on about globalisation, economic diversification and empowerment. Dear MPs, before we get a glimpse of all that, what about our readiness to adopt and adapt to changes in a global environment? First and foremost, the average Mauritian badly needs a shift in mindset. But our social, educational and cultural system is far from being geared towards producing such rare local breeds on a mass basis.

A famous global brand (which needs no further introduction to the average Mauritian) has once again showed how flawed and fragile our society can be in the face of Western provocation. It?s about time we start walking the talk.

Krishan L.K. DEELJORE