Introduction

Nowadays, controversial advertisements have been more and more quickly spread in the market. Marketers actually may deliberately or unintentionally make their advertisements controversial. Sometimes they are not realizing that their advertisements are controversial until the advertisement creates much criticism from the public. If the ads are deliberately created to be controversial, it is actually the marketers are intended to gain attention to the audience and bring up positive results. However, if the ads are actually unintentionally controversial, it will be unintended negative consequences which may be harmful to organizational reputation and then also possible to harm the products brands. Moreover, there might be times when marketers are intentional in making their campaigns moderately controversial but their ads results in unintended negative consequences as marketers cannot control the controversy. Because of that, people who receive the message from the campaigns find the ads are too offensive. Therefore, it is possible to make they hate the product brands that promoted in the ads. So, organizations should be able to handle the situation effectively when responding to such situations.

The first place that the definitions of the controversial and offensive advertisement are differ is very important to be noted. Controversial ads can be defined as “advertising that, by the type of product or execution can elicit reactions of embarrassment, distaste, disgust, offence, or outrage from a segment of the population when presented (Waller, 2005). In this sense, the controversial ads will lead to either negative or positive consequences as a results of extreme emotional response they elicit from the receivers. On the other hands, the offensive ads only include those that result in negative consequences and therefore are subsets of controversial ads.

The studies on both of offensive and controversial advertising have gained attention from marketing scholars. The previous literature has addressed issues including factors influencing controversial ads (Beard, 2008; Fam, Waller, & Erdogan, 2004; Waller, 2007), culture and controversial ads (Chan et. Al., 2007; Fam & Waller, 2003), perceptions of audience towards offensive ads, and response to controversial ads (Waller, 2005; Waller & Polonsky, 1996). Waller (2005) was proposed a response model for controversial ads. In this model, he showed the interaction process that starting from the audience being exposed to the ads as well as their mental and physical responses to the ads. His model is very important because it provided a good basis for studying response for controversial ads to help us to understand more deeply about the process from the audience perspective. However, it did not discuss the communication strategies to handle the situations where message receivers found the controversial ads offensive.

Furthermore, when any controversial ads become offensive to any certain group of people, it should be acknowledge the causes of offensiveness or identify the rational reasons why the people perceive those ads as controversial. It is important to any organization as a guide to overcome the problem. There three reasons that the sense being offended. One of the reasons is unintentional ignorance. Unintentional ignorance is very dangerous because it will lead advertisers and marketers to create advertisements that may be sensitive to certain groups of people. Usually, this situation will occur in international ads because the culture over the world is different among each other. Sometimes the advertisers or marketers already done research about the differences of culture among the people over the world especially to the targeted audiences but there are some people those like to know everything about every culture over the world. The second reason is it is so hard for advertisers or marketers to create advertising that can be accepted by every single person. For example, when the advertisers or marketers created advertisement about sex appeal or violence that will focus to the younger generation audiences, but the ads will give negative perceptions to the older generation because they maybe finds the ads very offensive. The third reason is related to the second one that is people who are not targeted in the ads campaign also exposed to the message in the ads (Waller, 2005). The last one is the services, topics or products that advertised may be sensitive by their nature to the public such as condom ads.