Disturbed Ad Pulled After On-Air Murder of Two Newscasters

In case you missed it, two Virginia newscasters were gunned down on air yesterday by a disgruntled former co-worker who then killed himself. You can read about the horrible tragedy here.

While this happening was horrible on its own it was also bad for Disturbed, whose online promos for their new album, Immortalized, feature footage from the video for their new single “The Vengeful One”… in which the band’s Evil Ernie-esque mascot guns people down at a TV station. In response, Warner Bros has pulled the ad.

The potential offensiveness of the ad was minimized — according to Gogi Gupta of Gupta Media, the company which placed the ad — by who would be seeing it:

“The video was served via retargeting, matched to previous web-browsing behaviour. So only a visitor who’d interacted with Disturbed websites would be eligible to see it.”

Anyone who watches the video for “The Vengeful One” can understand how different it is from the Virginia shooting — Virginia is not a post-apocalyptic kingdom of brainwashers, the newscasters murdered were not mindless robots or cannibal demons in disguise, and shooter Vester Lee Flanagan II was not a cosmic biker-monster. We faithfully remind our readers that fantasy is fantasy, which is obviously what Disturbed’s video portrays. However, given the nature of the shootings and the clinical execution themes of the video and ad based on it, it’s understandable why Warner would pull it.

We’re sorry we had to begin your day with news about a terrible event and Disturbed.

[via Metal Hammer]