Buenos Aires, May 7 (ANI): Argentina's Foreign Minister, Hector Timerman, has refused to apologise for the advert that shows Olympic hopeful Fernando Zylberberg training on "Argentine soil" in the Falkland Islands.
He rather launched an attack on UK Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond, saying, "Mr. Hammond should know that the world is safer when we use our creativity, rather than bomb civilians in sovereign countries."
The advert shows Zylberberg, an Argentine hockey player, preparing in Stanley for the upcoming Olympics, followed by a slogan "To compete on English soil, we train on Argentine soil."
Despite a request from WPP, the British agency, of pulling the advert, to the Argentinean Young and Rubicam, responsible for creating the advert, the Argentine government has said that they will continue to broadcast it.
According to The Telegraph, Timerman, who took Argentina's sovereignty claim to the Falklands to the UN, has criticised Britain's "militarisation" of the South Atlantic, and added that Hammond is an "adversary of whom to be fearful".
"I imagine that, since he assumed his role as Defence Secretary, Mr Hammond has been so busy controlling the many British soldiers at war that he has not had time to read Margaret Atwood, born in one of his," he said.
Martin Mercado, Creative Director of Y and R Argentina, claimed that now the agency cannot ask for the advert to be pulled as it belonged to the Argentine government.
"The idea was that an Argentine athlete went to train on what, for us, is Argentine soil," he said. (ANI)
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Comments:
Rufus
May 7, 2012 at 3:05 PM
The majority of the offense was caused by the fact that the Argentine hockey player was doing step aerobics on a war memorial (it is a memorial to those sailors killed in the world war one Battle of the Falkland Islands).
The irony is that Zylberberg has played his hockey in northern Spain since 2002, "To compete on English soil, we train on Spanish soil and travel to the Falkland Islands to jump on war memorials."
The ad agency (Y&R) in question was the Argentine office of a US based subsiduary of a UK company.