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CNN Insight

Benetton's Death Row Ads

Aired March 1, 2000 - 0:00 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JONATHAN MANN, INSIGHT (voice-over): Model prisoners. One of the world's best-known brands turns to convicted killers in its latest ad campaign. It may be controversial and even sell clothes, but has Benetton crossed the line?

(on camera): Hello, and welcome.

No country has a monopoly on killing, but the United States stands out among major democracies for its government's willingness to do it. Seventy-five people were executed in the U.S. last year. The state of Texas executed a female prisoner last week and plans to execute a male next this week.

The entire country has debated the morality of capital punishment for so long, there isn't a whole lot that remains to be said. But there is something new being seen - a series of photographs and interviews of prisoners awaiting execution in the U.S.

The Italian clothing company Benetton says it is trying to put a human face on death row. But now Benetton finds itself in trouble with the law and the industry. On our program today -- prisoners of fashion.

CNN's David Mattingly reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEROME MALLETT, DEATH ROW INMATE: Everybody gets born is going to die. You just don't know when you going to die. I was born, so I'm going to die, you know? Unfortunately, it will be probably through execution.

DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Their eyes and features convey powerful messages and provoke the strongest of emotional reactions. They are the most talked about and controversial faces in advertising -- the faces of death row.

BOBBY LEE HARRIS, DEATH ROW INMATE: Sometimes I wonder if it's going to hurt. I wonder what it's going to be like really.

JAMES EDWARD THOMAS, DEATH ROW INMATE: The first 30 days you're waiting for that execution you don't understand. When I got here the first 30 days, I'm under the impression I'll be executed.

MATTINGLY: And from behind bars, these people are now behind the label of designer clothing manufacturer Benetton through the vision of creative director Oliviero Toscani.

OLIVIERO TOSCANI, BENETTON CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Some people get angry at my work because actually they get angry at themselves. They don't want to deal with the image that I proposed.

MATTINGLY: Based in Italy, Benetton has long promoted its brand by pursuing an aggressive social agenda through its advertising. Using Toscani's provocative photographs, the campaigns incite passions and sell product.

Often controversial and sometimes banned, Toscani's images have been used to promote Benetton's position on racism, violence, AIDS and now the death penalty.

TOSCANI: Any serial killer compared state of Texas is an amateur. I mean, I will not like to pay taxes in a state who's got death penalty. I wouldn't like to be a collaborator. I cannot be collaborator. No, I will refuse to pay taxes in a state that's got death penalty or (INAUDIBLE), and I think people should do that.

MATTINGLY: Two years in the making, the $20 million campaign includes a catalogue of photos and interviews putting a human face on death row. The pictures are currently in issues of Talk magazine, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. Twenty-five men and one woman -- all convicted killers sentenced to die, like John Lotter.

(on camera): What do you think of the picture?

JOHN LOTTER, DEATH ROW INMATE: It's one of my better ones, I guess. Age is catching up on me.

MATTINGLY: We met with Lotter on Nebraska's death row. If his face is not familiar to you, his story might be. He was convicted of killing three people, including Tina Brandon, a woman who was secretly living her life as a man. Her story and Lotter's crime became the critically acclaimed film "Boys Don't Cry."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "BOYS DON'T CRY")

ACTOR: So you're a boy? Now what?

ACTOR: Come on.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: And when Benetton came calling, Lotter was anxious to make his feelings on the death penalty known.

LOTTER: They say, well, you can't kill, but then they turn around and do that. So...

MATTINGLY (on camera): When people read your comments and see your picture, what do you want them to think about you?

LOTTER: I'm human just like anybody else. I'm just in here for what the courts say isn't -- is my mistake.

JOANNE BRANDON, MOTHER OF VICTIM: If you're human, you don't kill. You don't take somebody's life or injure them in some way that puts you on death row. You're on death row because you usually take somebody's life.

MATTINGLY (voice-over): Joanne Brandon is Tina Brandon's mother. She hadn't seen the Benetton pictures until our interview.

BRANDON: He's got cold eyes, like there's nothing behind them.

MATTINGLY: She was quick to notice Lotter's picture and a Benetton logo sharing the page with a bold-type Lotter quote that read, "I think people like seeing other people suffer and killed."

BRANDON: Well, that's true. I would like seeing other people suffer and killed. He killed my daughter and two other people. He took their lives. He didn't come up and say, "May I kill you?" He just did it.

So why not? I want to see him suffer, and I want to see him killed, yes.

MATTINGLY (on camera): Did you enjoy seeing Tina Brandon killed?

LOTTER: I have made my point on that very clear in court. I cannot comment on that right now. My case is still in the process.

MATTINGLY (voice-over): Lotter is appealing his conviction, while Joanne Brandon maintains her seething anger over her daughter's murder. Nowhere in the Benetton ads is there any mention of the victims or how they were killed. We showed excerpts of our interview with Joanne Brandon to Toscani, her comments about the company.

BRANDON: I think it's the worst company that there could be right now.

MATTINGLY: Her opinion of their campaign.

BRANDON: I just think it's really insulting to the parents of these kids.

MATTINGLY: And the pain of her loss.

BRANDON: When he fries, I'll be sitting right there watching him. He took my baby.

MATTINGLY (on camera): He took her baby.

TOSCANI: Yes, I'm not saying he didn't. I'm not saying that John Lotter is innocent.

MATTINGLY: But to put his face and his comments in a national forum and say nothing of the crime that he committed?

TOSCANI: I put it from another angle. Everybody is a child of somebody else. So I understand that woman very well. I also understand the sense of personal vengeance that come from a very (INAUDIBLE) need of humanity. You know, she think that by killing him, probably she will get her daughter back. But she won't get her daughter back, unfortunately.

JOE DIAMOND, VICTIMS' RIGHTS ADVOCATE: Why would they take the murderers, the cold-blooded killers of their loved ones and turn them into celebrities? Why would they do that? I mean, people are astonished at this, they're bewildered and they're angry.

MATTINGLY (voice-over): Joe Diamond speaks for a coalition of victims rights groups and police organizations called "Benetton Be Gone." The group has protested outside Benetton stores, calling for a boycott. Meanwhile, retail giant Sears announced it was removing all Benetton products from its stores nationwide.

(on camera): In recent developments, the criticism of Benetton goes even further. Prison officials in several states now say they were misled by Benetton's request for access to death row inmates. They say they had no idea they were contributing to an advertising campaign, in particular one that puts the faces of convicted killers on public billboards.

(voice-over): The Missouri attorney general filed suit against Benetton and several individuals, including Oliviero Toscani, alleging fraud and deception. The state is seeking compensation and damages.

Also, in Nebraska, officials are now seeking legal advice in how to handle an alleged violation of prison rules. They intercepted a $1,000 Benetton check made out to death row inmate Jeremy Sheets. Sheets was convicted in 1992 racially motivated murder of 17-year-old honor student Kinyata Bush (ph).

DIAMOND: They raped her. They stabbed her. They slit her throat, and then they left her body in the woods. That's what this man did, and he got $1,000 from Benetton. This is reprehensible. I mean, this is outrageous.

TOSCANI: I don't know why they got angry. I mean, I did all this in a legal way. I didn't do anything illegal. I think it is my interest to raise question.

MATTINGLY: A Benetton spokesman in the U.S. says payment was offered to seven inmates. Only two accepted -- Sheets in Nebraska and Jerome Mallett in Missouri. A brief written statement from Benetton says the Missouri charges are "inaccurate and politically motivated."

But when it comes to public outrage, Toscani says he's willing to take the blame. If the purpose of bringing the American public face-to- face with killers on death row was to elicit an emotional response, then the Benetton campaign is already a huge success.

TOSCANI: You know, you get angry when you think. Already, that is not bad. You can't get angry without thinking. You must look at something, think about and react. So they got angry. That means that they talk about the image.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: According to a recent poll conducted by Ad Week magazine, 54 percent of online readers said the ads exploited human suffering. Forty-six percent approved of them, saying the ads get people talking.

But do they sell? In a moment, a look at Benetton's strategy and what Madison Avenue thinks of death row. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN (voice-over): From the very beginning, Benetton has defied convention. It makes its clothes differently. It distributes them differently. And as you can see, it advertises them very differently. In many Benetton ads, the product seems to be an image, an attitude or an opinion. Benetton seems as eager to make an impression as a sale.

(on camera): Welcome back.

Benetton sells about $2 billion a year of clothing. So clearly, something is working. Joining us now to talk about the advertising is Alice Cuneo, national retail editor and West Coast bureau chief for Advertising Age.

Thanks so much for being with us. Let me ask you, first of all - death row aside - about the rationale, about the thinking, about the success of all these years of all these extraordinary Benetton images. Are they selling clothes?

ALICE CUNEO, ADVERTISING AGE: Well, they may be selling in other countries, but in the United States, Benetton has been struggling. It's running far, far behind The Gap, and it's become a kind of a brand that unfortunately people have referred to as one that sells poor quality clothes at high prices. So their product has not been doing very well in the United States.

MANN: Any relationship there, do you think, between that problem and the latest ad campaign?

CUNEO: I think it's very clear that what Benetton is doing is what magicians always try to do in their acts - have people look the wrong way at the right time. And certainly they don't want to be known for their high-priced, poor-quality clothing. Instead, have people talking about the death row issue.

I don't know if it's going to sell clothes in the United States, but it certainly has generated a lot of media discussion. And their billboards and - were only shown in a couple of cities and, as you mentioned, they were in four magazines, which is a relatively limited ad campaign for this country.

Yet there have been dozens of programs just like this where the media has discussed, you know, Benetton and the death issue. So they've gotten a lot of impressions at a very good price -- basically for free.

MANN: It sounds like a cynical attempt not to advertise clothing or even help a cause, but to get a particular brand into the press.

CUNEO: It's an interesting way that, you know, when you put it like that, many companies have now realized that they must reach out into the community and to build their brands, they want to be associated with causes. And for example, this week in the United States, Home Depot is running an ad about a panda habitat that its -- Home Depot employees built in Atlanta for two pandas on loan for China.

In addition to that, the Home Depot has put about $1 million of its president and its owner's money and company money behind support for panda-related causes. I don't see Benetton with all of these various issues that it's raised in its advertising, I'm not sure that it's made a sincere financial commitment to help, for example, the families of these inmates or do something to prevent crime.

It's really just basically the advertising is about shock and buzz and not really, I don't think, about examining the issues.

MANN: I saw one article in the press describe once again the photographs - the art director Oliviero Toscani gets the credit for them - but in this case, the article described the photographs as "tired."

Not looking at the morality of this, but just looking at it as advertising from an advertising professional like yourself, is it good? Is it innovative? Is it still energetic?

CUNEO: I don't know that the work itself, the creative itself is all that interesting, you know, or cutting-edge as the concept is. You know, the idea of bringing death row inmates into advertising is what's innovative. The execution of it may not particularly have been so.

MANN: Let me ask you about the access to the inmates. There is some question about entirely how honest the people at Benetton were when getting access to the inmates. There is some question about how moral they were in paying inmates to describe their plights in sympathetic terms when they've been found guilty of some heinous crimes.

Is there anyone in the advertising industry who oversees this kind of behavior? Is there anyone in the advertising industry if they're shocked by this that can do anything about it?

CUNEO: Well, basically, it's up to the individual media outlets. There is no advertising czar, and certainly all of these concepts fall under the freedom of speech issues in this country, so they couldn't really be censored. And the Federal Trade Commission or something is not going to, you know, censor -- not censor, but regulate something like this.

MANN: And the ad industry itself just kind of shrugs and goes on with its work?

CUNEO: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's up to really the media companies. It's up to Talk magazine to decide whether it's going to run these things. Television commercials are rejected all the time by the networks. So it's up to the integrity of the media companies, which can be influenced, in turn, by other advertisers, you know, for those brands as to whether they continue with, you know, you run the ads or not. There is no media. There is no czar.

MANN: It's also, I guess, up to the people who sell the clothes and buy the clothes. And Sears, which is an enormous chain, has decided not to sell the clothes. How counterproductive does that make the campaign? How much of a hit is that for the company to take in its effort to, in fact, sell clothing?

CUNEO: Well, Sears was, you know, trying to reach a younger audience, and that's what motivated them to become involved with Benetton. And they had a license. Benetton itself was not making the clothes that were to be sold at Sears. Benetton had designed the clothes, a third party manufactured them, and Sears sold them under the Benetton USA label.

They went into the stores in August. They were selling quite well, and Sears was blindsided, they said, by this campaign. Having read about it in Ad Age and other journals, they decided to call Benetton and renegotiate their contract at which time they asked for a prior review of ads -- not censorship, but at least to see what the ads were about.

And as someone at Sears said to me, "Why couldn't they have stuck with AIDS?" or some of the other causes. As soon as the word got out, again through the media, and not so much because this advertising was so high impact, you know, on every television station in prime time in the evening because there was no TV aspect to it. It was, again, a few billboards.

When word got out, there was a demonstration, and there were letters, hundreds of letters and e-mails sent to Sears. There was a demonstration at the Houston store, and they felt not only did they want prior review, but they, in fact, were going to pull the plug. After that happened, Benetton and some of the analysts felt that Benetton would not have lost so much money.

But what Benetton is going to be gaining is they're moving to an online presence, e-commerce. So they'll be selling their clothes on the Internet to Americans in Nebraska and everywhere else, and this raises their brand image, or at least gets their name out there to the public.

MANN: Are people, as a result, inclined to imitate this kind of advertising? You see more advertising than most of us. Is there a trend toward this kind of thing?

CUNEO: Absolutely. Benetton is the leader. But we have seen the onslaught, as you know, with all the dot-com advertising in the U.S. There are, you know, from the man urinating on the Super Bowl, just right across. People are just hoping that their controversial advertising will get talked about, picked up on the talk shows, picked up on the news stories.

You've even some actual charity-type organizations -- recently in San Francisco, there was a bit of a flap over an ad for a cancer group which had a Cosmopolitan-like billboard put up and it showed a woman's breasts, except that she had had them removed for mastectomies because of breast cancer.

So as a result, you know, that caused a lot of, you know, evening news reporting, and certainly they got much more of a -- many more people saw them than they would have if they were simply on a couple of bus shelters in San Jose.

MANN: Well, people can get your attention by stepping on your toe or crashing into your car, but it wouldn't make you well disposed towards them. Do consumers turn away from people who try to get their attention by offending them?

CUNEO: Some of them do. You know, certainly people, you know, in the prisoners' rights group I wouldn't be surprised if they're not, you know, buying Benetton products in high quantity. But a lot of -- I guess there is kind of an old adage that goes, "I don't care what you say about me, just get my name out there."

MANN: More of it, and is it going to get more shocking, do you think?

CUNEO: I don't know. I think at some point, we found with the Super Bowl this year that there were so many dot-com ads of an outrageous kind of nature that eventually they get to become ho-hum. I mean, eventually, I don't know how far - you know, it probably will go for a little bit longer. But then at some point, I think it's just going to be a part of the clutter like everything else.

MANN: Alice Cuneo of Advertising Age. Thank you so much for being with us.

CUNEO: Thank you.

MANN: One last thing before we go about how the death penalty in the U.S. can also be an issue in local politics, but across the Atlantic in France. Jack Lang, a French lawmaker who's running for mayor of Paris, has been appealing for clemency in the case of a Texas man convicted of killing a nurse.

Lang visited the death row inmate, Odell Barnes, and says he's convinced that the prisoner is innocent. French prime minister Lionel Jospin has also requested that the man be spared, an appeal that at this late stage appears to be in vain. American death row inmates making politics in France.

That's INSIGHT for this day. I'm Jonathan Mann. Stay with us. There's more news just ahead.

END

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