Music

British Government Mercilessly Mocked For An Ad Suggesting Artists Give Up On Their Dreams

An ad suggesting that 'Fatima' is about to get into "cyber" has become a massive meme.

by Joseph Earp  14 October 2020
Fatima in Cyber ad

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The coronavirus pandemic has been a “mask off” moment around the world in terms of governmental treatment of artists.

In the UK in particular, those in charge have repeatedly suggested that anyone employed in creative industries “reskill” in order to help the economy in the aftermath of the pandemic. And that’s all being said while bigwigs ignore the massive cultural and financial impact of artists, presumably in order to play into a long and extremely tiresome culture war.

After all, as many on Twitter have been quick to point out, artists contribute in a range of ways to the fostering of a community and a country. Pretending that they’re merely wasting time and taxpayer money is a myth.

But hey, that hasn’t stopped the UK government from stepping up its campaign against artists in a particularly disastrous fashion, through a “reskill” campaign so crass it got pulled after a matter of days.

The advert features a photograph of a ballerina named ‘Fatima’, with accompanying text suggesting that she’s ready to embark on a long career in “cyber”.

Within hours of the campaign going up, it became the source of much mockery, with the phrase “in cyber” becoming its own viral meme. Before you could say “rethink, reskill, reboot” three times fast, there were an ungodly number of photographs of the Cybermen from Doctor Who flooding the app.

Indeed, so negative was the response that Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary, distanced himself from the campaign.

But that wasn’t the end of the government’s troubles. Eventually it turned out that ‘Fatima’ was actually a resident of Atlanta, Georgia, not the United Kingdom, and that their name wasn’t even Fatima. Oh, and they are pissed about being used in this way.

Sounds to me like the government could really have used someone trained in visual storytelling to help them with this campaign. Maybe an artist, for instance?