Benetton Group - Marketing

Marketing

The company is known for sponsorship of a number of sports, and for the provocative and original "United Colors" publicity campaign. The latter originated when photographer Oliviero Toscani was given carte blanche by the Benetton management. Under Toscani's direction, ads were created that contained striking images unrelated to any actual products being sold by the company.

These graphic, billboard-sized ads included depictions of a variety of shocking subjects, one of which featured a deathbed scene of a man (AIDS activist David Kirby) dying from AIDS. Others included a bloodied, unwashed newborn baby with umbilical cord still attached, which was highly controversial. This 1991 advert prompted more than 800 complaints to the British Advertising Standards Authority during 1991 and was featured in the reference book Guinness World Records 2000 as 'Most Controversial Campaign'. Others included a black horse mating over a white one, close-up pictures of tattoos reading "HIV Positive" on the bodies of men and women, a cemetery of many cross-like tombstones, a collage consisting of genitals of persons of various races, a priest and nun about to engage in a romantic kiss, pictures of inmates on death row, an electric chair, an advert showing a boy with hair shaped into the devil's horns, three different hearts with "black", "white" and "yellow" written onto them (from March 1996), and a picture of a bloodied t-shirt and pants ridden with bullet holes from a soldier killed in the Bosnian War (this one appeared in February 1994). The company's logo served as the only text accompanying the images in most of these advertisements. Most of the advertisements, although not all, saw a plain white background behind the image.