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Henry Sy and company will soon learn that people don’t just forget.
On Nov 3, BDO Unibank, sister company of Henry Sy-owned SM, posted a photo on Facebook that asked its followers a question that, to begin with, doesn’t make any sense: “Save the environment or save up to see places?”
It’s an ad for the BDO rewards card, showing a mashed up photo of a guy holding a placard that reads “Stop deforestation.” The girl with him in the photo is dressed in hiking gear.
For some reason, BDO took it down. But not before Facebooker Renee Karunungan took a screenshot of it.
Today, Karunungan posted it back on her Facebook Timeline, called the company shitty, and their ad, highly illogical.
“So BDO Unibank deleted this post. But of course there is a reason screenshots were made. I’m putting it back so that we can all have a record of how shitty this company is (and the owners of the company),” Karunungan writes on Facebook.
She added that BDO is a business owned by Sy, the guy who (duh) owns SM. That very SM that cut down trees in Baguio City to build a parking lot. And yup, the very same SM that built a mall near Marikina Riverbank, which “exacerbated the already big problem flood in Marikina.”
Speaking with Coconuts Manila, Karunungan said, “It quickly caught fire, and I saw a lot of comments against it. They [BDO Unibank] were commenting, ‘we will take note of your feedback’ but they never answered the questions raised by their followers about what they wanted to say with their ad.”
Looks like BDO and SM will have to work overtime to troubleshoot this problem.
Screenshot from Renee Karunungan (with permission to use).
— Update —
What was BDO thinking? Apparently, that “save the environment” ad above is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s an elaborate campaign that includes other equally, erm, misguided choices. The bank has since pulled out all the ads, but again, not fast enough for angry folks who managed to take screen grabs for them all. Below are the rest:
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