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SEX

Media watchdog slams ads with naked women and Hitler

A meat company in Germany that advertised its wares with the image of a naked woman emblazoned across its delivery trucks, and other ads using gratuitous nudity came under fire Wednesday from an industry watchdog.

Media watchdog slams ads with naked women and Hitler
A screenshot of the GM Fleisch website. Mmmm. Meat! Photo: DPA

The G and M Meat Products ads – with the tag line “Beauty Comes From Inside” – were unacceptable, the German Advertising Association said in a report which also attacked another firm’s website for using Adolf Hitler as a mascot.

“The understandable interpretation for the observer that a woman was being compared with fresh meat is degrading and highly sexist,” the association said in a statement, citing the ruling by its 13-member Advertising “Such corporate propaganda violates the principles of the Advertising Council by discriminating against people and belittling them.”

The reprimand was part of a report issued by the board against 30 advertising campaigns in the first half of the year. It said that in 26 cases the admonished companies withdrew their advertisements, one changed the offending campaign and three went ahead despite the council’s criticism, leading it to release a statement to the press.

The companies included a genealogy website that used a picture of Nazi dictator Hitler on its homepage in a reference to delving into Germany’s wartime past. A computer company was slammed for using the image of a naked woman in profile stretching her arms into the air with the tagline “Game. Set. Match.” The Council said the campaign abused female nudity as an eye-catcher “without any clear connection to the product it was advertising.” The board called an ad by a furniture company in northern Germany “particularly crass” for showing a woman whose skirt was cut out to reveal her crotch.

The Advertising Council monitors the industry and is a clearinghouse for complaints from the public about offensive or misleading content.

BUSINESS

Google News to return to Spain after seven-year spat

Google announced Wednesday the reopening of its news service in Spain next year after the country amended a law that imposed fees on aggregators such as the US tech giant for using publishers’ content.

Google News to return to Spain after seven-year spat
Google argues its news site drives readers to Spanish newspaper and magazine websites and thus helps them generate advertising revenue.Photo: Kenzo TRIBOUILLARD / AFP

The service closed in Spain in December 2014 after legislation passed requiring web platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay publishers to reproduce content from other websites, including links to their articles that describe a story’s content.

But on Tuesday the Spanish government approved a European Union copyright law that allows third-party online news platforms to negotiate directly with content providers regarding fees.

This means Google no longer has to pay a fee to Spain’s entire media industry and can instead negotiate fees with individual publishers.

Writing in a company blog post on Wednesday, Google Spain country manager Fuencisla Clemares welcomed the government move and announced that as a result “Google News will soon be available once again in Spain”.

“The new copyright law allows Spanish media outlets — big and small — to make their own decisions about how their content can be discovered and how they want to make money with that content,” she added.

“Over the coming months, we will be working with publishers to reach agreements which cover their rights under the new law.”

News outlets struggling with dwindling print subscriptions have long seethed at the failure of Google particularly to pay them a cut of the millions it makes from ads displayed alongside news stories.

Google argues its news site drives readers to newspaper and magazine websites and thus helps them generate advertising revenue and find new subscribers.

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