The whole trend of using dead celebrities in ads is a bad one. I believe it is fundementally wrong for anyone to endorse a product they don’t believe in. Someone who is no longer alive may well believe in a product, but if they are not around to tell us first hand, who the hell are we to presume?

The latest example of this is an ad for the one laptop per child program.  I think the program is a worthy one where people can donate money to send small, robust laptop computers to kids in developing countries.  It’s entirely possible that if John Lennon were alive today that he might be a supporter of the program.

The problem is that Lennon has been dead for 28 years. To take the image and words of someone that has been dead for nearly three decades and digitally manipulate them to create a message that person never conveyed is simply wrong. For the OLPC foundation and Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono to assume that Lennon would do such an ad if he were alive today is ethically and morally wrong. The fact that the OLPC foundation is a non-profit is utterly irrelevant. Other companies have done similar digitally manipulated ads for commercial products which I consider even more disturbing and abhorrent. It’s time for this to stop.