BELL MOBILITY CRASHES THE PARTY AT TORONTO NIGHTCLUB
By Adnews Staff
A Bell Mobility advertisement that features a group of people dancing has resulted in a $300,000 lawsuit against the telecommunications company, an article in the Globe and Mail has reported. The ad, for a Bell Mobility campaign for its pagers and QuickChange phone cards, created by Cossette Communication-Marketing, includes a photograph taken at a Toronto nightclub in 1998. Included in the group of people dancing is DJ and songwriter Natacha Labelle, 30, and artist Jayson Von Rowatt, 32. According to the article, the two did not realize they were having their picture taken and never gave Bell Mobility permission to include them in its advertising campaign. The advertisement is reported to have run in Toronto subways, on buses and streetcars and in Bell Mobility stores in the spring of 1999. Both Labelle and Von Rowatt were reported to have been offered $1,000 each from Cossette after the lawsuit was launched but both declined the money. Bell Mobility is defending the advertising saying the persons in the photograph cannot be identified and says "persons in the photograph were not portrayed or depicted as endorsing any product or service of Bell Mobility." Cossette is currently not named as a defendant the article said.