Still reeling (or perhaps benefiting) from last month’s “vulgar” BLACKPINK ad controversy, e-commerce giant Shopee isn’t done utilizing the hugely popular K-pop girl group yet — one which is pretty uniquely cheeky.
Shopee’s latest ad for their new year sale features BLACKPINK members, only with the lower half of their bodies depicted as drawings this time, possibly to skirt around certain people’s overzealous interpretations of vulgarity.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BsUOTI_n2_5/
Shopee said it had last month’s controversy in mind when coming up with this ad.
“Hopefully now everyone can accept [the ad] without any long debates,” Shopee country brand manager Rezki Yanuar told Kumparan today.
“We want to prove to everyone that creativity is wide open and determined by the perspective of the creator and the viewer.”
According to Kumparan, BLACKPINK are still under an exclusive contract with Shopee, which will last through this year.
In early December 2018, a journalism lecturer named Maimon Herawati sparked a debate about censorship in Indonesia after she started a petition appealing to the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI) to have Shopee’s previous ad — featuring “scantily clad” BLACKPINK members singing and dancing — banned because she thought the ad was “vulgar”.
Despite a huge backlash from the parts of the public (especially K-pop fans), the petition went viral, gained over 100,000 signatures and was successful in getting KPI to officially ban the ad on TV (although their ban was only issued on the day the ad was supposed to end its TV run anyways).
Will Shopee’s cheeky new BLACKPINK ad manage to avoid a similarly pointless scandal? We can’t say for sure, since even cartoons have become victims of overzealous Indonesian censors in the past.
