If you haven’t seen this ad for CW’s teen show, Gossip Girls featuring the Parents’ Television Council’s scathing review yet, you will now: they are everywhere.
Gossip Girls could have responded to the Parent’s Television Council with a “very special” episode showing teenagers the consequences of risky behavior. Instead, the show created an entire advertising campaign around negativity. There’s two other ads in the campaign featuring the quotes “every parent’s nightmare” from the Boston Herald and “a nasty piece of work” from the New York Post.
Is the ad campaign itself “nasty?” Sure, but I think it’s clever and different enough to break through to the target demographic who want to do everything their parents find “inappropriate.”