A couple of Volkswagen bigwigs say they’re baffled by how an inflammatory ad for their Golf 8 made it onto their Instagram and Facebook pages.
The ad shows a large hand of a white person pushing away a dark-skinned man from a vehicle, another lifting him up, then the first plucking him into a cafe in Buenos Aires, Argentina, called Petit Colon, French translation for the Little Colonist or Little Settler.
When criticism of the offending ad began, Volkswagen took to Instagram to say the ethnicities of the people shown are irrelevant, and it was “surprised and shocked that our Instagram story could be so misunderstood.”
“We posted a racist advertising video on Volkswagen’s Instagram channel,” Jürgen Stackmann, the company’s head of sales and marketing and Elke Heitmülle in charge of diversity, said this week in a post to social media.
There were a number of people who said they wouldn’t take Volkswagen’s apology, and the ad getting past so many people shows a lack of diversity in the company
“Anyone involved should be fired immediately, as they obviously lack any common sense or cultural awareness,” one person tweeted.
