Cultural risk review for ad campaigns
Second Look reads an ad’s picture, words and launch date against each market’s history, and cites the precedent for every flag.
Review your own ad
Drag it here or choose a file. PNG, JPEG or WebP, up to 10MB.
Can you spot the issue?
Flag what a local audience would object to: a spot on the ad, or a line of the brief.
A campaign is morethan its picture.
Retrieve precedent
Documented campaign failures are ranked against the campaign's markets and wording. The analyst gets them as reference, not a checklist.
65 documented incidents
Check the calendar
The launch date is crossed against each market's memorial, political and religious calendar. Moving holidays are flagged for local verification.
149 dates across 15 markets
Read it together
Claude examines the name, headline, body copy, date, channel and image on their own, then in combination, and names the exact referent for anything it flags.
Every finding cites its grounding
Draft an alternative
Findings that live in the picture compile into an art-direction note for the Magic Hour API. Copy and timing findings stay on screen.
The request is shown in full
The picture was fine.The words weren’t.
A tumbler called the Tank1, launched on May 182, with the slogan “Thwack3 it on the table!”
Starbucks Korea pulled the promotion within hours and fired its CEO. Nobody in the approval chain was malicious; they didn’t have the reference. The failure lived entirely in a name, a date and a slogan, which is why Second Look reads the whole campaign and not just the image.
Rebuilt with a fictional brand.
1Tank
Martial-law troops sent tanks against pro-democracy protesters in Gwangju in 1980.
The former South Jeolla Provincial Office in Gwangju, where the last protesters held out. Troops retook it in the early hours of May 27, 1980. Photo LERK, CC BY-SA 4.0.
2May 18
The anniversary of the Gwangju Democratization Movement, a national memorial day.
Portraits of the dead in the memorial hall at the May 18th National Cemetery, Gwangju. Photo Schlarpi, CC BY-SA 3.0.
3Thwack
Echoes the 1987 police account of student activist Park Jong-chul's death under torture.
Room 509 of the former police interrogation center at Namyeong-dong, Seoul, where Park Jong-chul died in January 1987. Police first claimed he collapsed when an investigator slammed the desk. Photo Jjw, CC BY-SA 4.0.