Rusty Radiator Award 2014

Jury’s comments: "What mother would put their suffering kid in the middle of the sun and just sit there? This is straight up staged, with shocking images of children in HD. You would never put an American kid in an ad like this, because there’s too much dignity given to the privacy of the children. It promotes every stereotype about malnutrition, and tries to encourage giving and donation out of guilt. It’s like they found them by the roadside just waiting to die."

Jury’s comments: Uhm, wow. We’re speechless. They just got it wrong. This is an attempt to get Facebook likes and clicks by putting sex and poverty together. By using celebrities in this fashion, the message becomes hollow and meaningless. The models are made to look stupid. “I detest this kind of bullying. This video made me cringe”, says David.

Jury’s comments: The winner of the Rusty Radiator 2013 is back! We thought we were watching a parody of it. They are basically using the same scenes they always use, we’d like to know how old these shots are. “Do you know what poverty looks like” – does it look like a person? Who talks about a human being like that? Teddy describes it as “poverty porn, white saviour complex, over-simplification to the causes of poverty to the missing $1 silver bullet solution to poverty”, and Boima as “everything that’s wrong with fundraising”. “I am amazed that this would run at any TV-station in the world”, says Rosebell.

Jury’s comments: Completely ‘White Saviour’. David had to turn it off after 10 seconds. Racism isn’t something of 200 years back, it’s something very present in South Africa today. It’s interesting how this was produced by one of the biggest advertising companies in the world, and how they got it so very wrong. The message doesn’t justify using the same stereotypes to both raise awareness and steal agency. The poor are already depicted as incapable of their own rescue, now they are being compared to dogs. What next? Is there a score worse than 0?