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Ledger zombie pizza promo pulled

Mmm, tasteful

A bunch of New Zealand pizza-peddlers have nixed an animated email ad campaign showing three dead celebs dancing to Halloween evergreen Thriller.

The Beeb reports that the sensitive and subtle promotion featured cartoon-corpse representations of Sir Edmund Hillary, the Queen Mother and Batman actor Heath Ledger having a little boogie on some graves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the celebrated climber's family has taken a degree of offence and described the ad as in "disturbing" and in "extremely poor taste".

A spokesman for the cholesterol-fest snack merchant in question widened his eyes and insisted there was absolutely no offence meant, and it was all just jolly good japes, because the first rule of advertising as everyone knows is that there is no value whatsoever in being deliberately a little bit shocking or dubious and thereafter getting gullible news services to do your dirty work for you for free. The very idea.

"Clearly [Hillary] is revered in New Zealand and we all love him," simpered the spokesbloke. "The idea of Sir Ed being there was intended to be a light-hearted remembrance." Having thus laid waste to the conventions of grammar along with the memory of the famous mountain climber, he then ran cackling into the night leaving a trail of receipts and print-outs of soaring web stats in his wake.

The ad, seen by around 5,000 people, has been pulled in a mark of a job well done and backslaps all round humble respect for the families.

Next week: some other clever git with the morals of a European hornet fails to get namechecked by us for whatever lame controversy-grubbing stunt they manage to squeeze out. ®

Bootnote

Any commentards stretching their spuriousness muscles to finagle anything about Sachsgate into the comments will be sent to the grave without any supper.

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