This Week In Clueless Advertising

This week a Turkish cosmetics company ran an ad for hair removal product Epila, featuring the bleary-eyed image of known terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. You may remember Mr. Mohammed as the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks back in 2001.

Whoops!

Mahmet Can Yildiz, a spokesman for the company, claimed ignorance in the gaffe. "We featured him for his hair, not terrorism," said Yildiz. "We didn't know that he was a terrorist."

Uh-huh. C'mon, guys! This greasy, unkempt malcontent is only slightly less infamous than Hitler! There's no way you can claim ignorance here. Gross incompetance, yes. But ignorance? I ain't buying it.

Somehow it's heartening to see that bumbling ineptitude in the ad world isn't just an American phenomenon.

Anyway, congratulations to the Epila company for their oafish faux pas. They win this week's Costanza Award:

"Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing, because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that featuring a known terrorist mastermind in a cosmetics ad is frowned upon... you know, cause I've worked in a lot of offices, and I tell you, people use revolutionaries and insurgents in marketing all the time."