Ginger Child for Ginger Beer Offer Has New Zealand Seeing Red

Rebekah Hay, the founder of New Zealand's Hakanoa Ginger Beer, seems none too pleased with the global negative publicity generated by an ad campaign concocted by M&C Saatchi that jokingly offers to swap your ginger-haired kid for a six-pack of the ginger product. It all began when adman Dave King's 8-year-old son was teased and bullied at school because of his red hair. King's in advertising, so his instinctive reaction was to devise a nonsensical campaign that, while perhaps intended as an "ironic" bit of reverse psychology, was interpreted by a substantial portion of the population as mean-spiritedly offensive.