Tysons Corner Center on Tuesday directed Metro to remove an ad for the mall that shows a woman in front of a wall strongly resembling the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with the names of the center’s stores appearing instead of those of the war dead.
Vietnam veterans and their families were appalled by the advertisement. Reacting quickly to condemnation led by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Tysons management ordered the ads taken down from the Metrorail cars where they have been posted.
“We are responding to the fund’s request and are moving quickly to remove this advertisement,” mall spokeswoman Allison Fischer said. “The ad design, which was developed as an evolution of the long-standing Tysons Corner Center campaign ‘Where the Stores are,’ was not intended to emulate any representation of the Memorial Wall.”
The ad features a black granite wall engraved with a list of shops. The store names are presented in virtually the same font on a highly reflective surface like the Vietnam memorial. There is an image in the background of what could be a rose, a flower often left at the wall.
“There’s no question my generation will see this as the wall,” Marshall Carter, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange and a veteran of two tours in Vietnam, told The Examiner. “There’s no getting around it. It jumps right off the page.”
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., called the ad “gross” and in “amazingly poor taste.” Bill Nelson, chairman and chief executive officer of Home Box Office, said the “commercial exploitation” of the memorial “is despicable and distasteful and grossly disrespectful to those who answered this country’s call to duty.”
More than 58,000 American men and women died in the war.
“There is nothing clever about this ad,” said Jan Scruggs, founder and president of the memorial fund. “It is, rather, both distasteful and disgusting.”
The poster was spotted on a Red Line train and photographed by Dave Stroup, who writes for the blog Why I Hate DC. Tysons paid $56,000 for a one-month run of 440 “rail car cards,” said Metro spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein.
Tysons holds “nothing but the greatest respect for the men and women who have served this country and we apologize to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund for any unintentional similarities” to the wall, Fischer said.
