Tragic image of heroin baby aims to end tragedy

A new advertisement for Barnardo's charity caused such controversy in Britain that, just three hours before its first appearance last Friday, moves were made to pull it from weekend broadsheets. Most went ahead with it, so alongside the usual fashion features and restaurant reviews sat a baby shooting up heroin in a filthy alley.

Its shock value went right off the Richter scale, but can the donating public be shocked into action or will such an upsetting image simply turn them off?

"There's a careful balance between cut-through and recoil," says Mr Pearse McCaughey, creative director of Cawley Nea, the agency responsible for the current Food Safety Authority campaign, which is considerably more shocking than previous government campaigns.

"It all depends on the motives of the advertiser and, in the case of Barnardo's, they're obviously above question. Creatively, this campaign seems a very clever way of communicating a message."

The controversial advertisement is part of Barnardo's current press campaign. Other advertisements show a young girl sleeping rough and a toddler about to jump off the roof of a car park. The main copy line always gives the child's name and current adult age.

As with the heroin baby, the idea is to show that everyone starts off as an innocent child and it is how they are treated that determines how they end up. So, the heroin baby is Mr John Donaldson (23) and the copy reads: "Battered as a child, it was always possible that John would turn to drugs." The UK Committee for Advertising Practice issued the advertisement alert on Friday, advising newspapers that the advertisement was likely to cause offence. Only the Telegraph dropped it. The image is still part of the campaign devised by London agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH).

"This isn't like Benetton using shocking images to sell cardigans," says Mr Martin Smith, deputy chairman of BBH, in reaction to the shock-for-shock-sake accusation. "I particularly resent the accusation that we are being in any way gratuitous. We're depicting real tragedy to stop real tragedy."

The grim image is a product of photo wizardry. The baby was shot sitting in a clean studio and he is really wrestling with a chocolate bar attached to a piece of string. The syringe, tourniquet and general squalor were all added in post-production.

Mr John Sutton, director of PCC, a not-for-profit Irish communications agency which handles advertising campaigns and strategies for several Irish charities, points out that it is hard to do good work in this area without alienating someone.

"Impactful images are fine provided they do not victimise the victim," he says. "You can't ever divorce context from content."

More than 600 of Cuisine de France's best customers will be in Gowran Park, Co Kilkenny this afternoon for the company's Thyestes raceday.

IAWS, the parent company of Cuisine de France, has been a long-time supporter of Irish flat racing and it has put up a total purse of £50,000 (€63,487) for one of the races, a £15,000 increase on its sponsorship last year. The company is adding a further £50,000 to the race card. Since opening in 1914, Gowran Park has never hosted such a wealthy purse.

Muc day, as every primary school student in the State knows, is tomorrow. It is Concern's latest fund-raising initiative for Kosovo and, while there has been intense fundraising activity in schools for the past three months, the main focus will be tomorrow when schools are being encouraged to go to a branch of AIB and deposit the funds raised into a special account.

Concern hopes to raise £250,000 (€317,434) through the appeal. AIB chipped in the capital necessary to fund the elaborate school information packs. The bank also provided funds for Muc, the giant flying piggy bank, to tour schools.

Cadburys can always be relied upon to prove that most of us manage to make our new year's resolutions last about five minutes. The company has just launched its 2000 batch of creme eggs. In the next 12 weeks, it expects Irish consumers to plough through at least 12 million of them. The brand is the number one impulse chocolate buy in January and February.

As usual, the British-devised "How do you eat yours?" television campaign will be used here, but this year Cadbury Ireland is using outdoor sites supported by a radio campaign featuring the D'Unbelievables.