bigideas

“Nice People Take Drugs“, said the ad on the side of buses. It drew complaints [UPDATE: See below]. Why? Well, I suppose that should be obvious. But it isn’t, or not exactly.

Without any context, my first reading was:

All people who are nice take drugs

That is,

∀(x) N(x)→D(x)

Of course, I quickly figured that that wasn’t likely to have been what was meant. So my next try was

All people who take drugs are nice

That is,

∀(x) D(x)→N(x)

But again a moment’s common-sense reflection told me this was unlikely to be the message of an ad on the side of a bus.

On reading the news story it became clear that the intended message was this:

Some people who take drugs are nice

That is,

∃(x) D(x)∧N(x)

I don’t suppose my failure to get this in a first or even second pass was unusual, which I guess is why CBS Outdoor have had complaints and asked the people who paid for the ads, the drugs charity Release, to re-word them.

According to the Guardian, though, Release CEO Sebastian Saville “said he found if [sic] difficult to understand why the campaign might be misconstrued.” I think that’s disingenuous. I think Release must have known the ad could be misconstrued, and there playing on it; either that or they really didn’t think about it too hard. Saville is a streetfighter who likes riling people up because it makes them think beyond the headlines. I like that about him, and I like the idea behind the campaign.

CBS Outdoor has suggested adding “too” to the end of the slogan. I think this makes it unambiguous. It would seem to rule out both of my misconstruals, which Saville says he didn’t intend. So why is he complaining that this amounts to “censorship” by “moral crusaders”? It isn’t censorship if it makes the intended message clearer and removes unwanted ambiguities. But maybe those ambiguities were, in fact, part of the message. I’m OK with that — like I said, I like the campaign — but if that’s how it is then why not just be up-front about it instead of recoiling into political-correctness-gone-mad-speak?

[UPDATE: It seems (see comments) that there were at least no complaints from members of the public about the ad. CBS Outdoor has withdrawn the ad pre-emptively, anticipating complaints, which is rather different. One might have thought they'd run it through compliance before accepting the copy, but I Am Not A Media Sales Exec.]