Warner Bros. Records pulled an album ad for heavy metal band Disturbed after the tragic shooting death of a Virginia TV news crew, USA Today reported. The ad featured a clip from the music video for the band's single "The Vengeful One," which depicts a shooting at a television news station.
Gupta Media, the online marketing agency responsible for placing the ad, released a statement explaining how the ad was able to reach fans.
"The Disturbed ad was served via retargeting. Retargeting ads are matched to previous web-browsing behavior, so only a visitor who had interacted with Disturbed websites would be eligible to see this ad," Gogi Gupta, founder of Gupta Media, said in a statement.
The song is the first single from Disturbed's album "Immortalized," which was released last Friday. A clip from the video for "The Vengeful One" was featured in online album ads, with a depiction of an animated motorcycle-riding alien monster that descends onto Earth to shoot anchors at a television news station. The video bears an eerie similarity to the recent tragedy in Virginia.
Vester Lee Flanagan shot and killed TV news reporter Alison Parker, 24, and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, on Wednesday morning during a live broadcast, as previously reported by HNGN. Flanagan, a disgruntled former employee at the Virginia CBS affiliate WDBJ7, fled the scene and later died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
In the song, Disturbed front man David Draiman sings the lyrics, "The rabid media plays their roles, stoking the flames of war to no surprise." He said that the song represented a depiction of an apocalypse.
"In the song, it's the End of Days. Things are getting worse, and we're becoming more destructive," Draiman told Blabbermouth. "The media is playing everyone against one another and baiting the entire world. It's judgment day."
