How to not sell milk, and cheese off people

Seoul Milk, South Korea's biggest dairy company, has redefined political incorrectness with one of their television advertisements. The promo shows a man hiking in the woods and then suddenly coming upon a bucolic clearing. Here, he finds beatific women in white robes doing yoga, drinking water off leaves, and seeming straight out of an impressionist painting far from man and mankind, and in the middle of nature. The man starts recording them with a videocam he has with him from behind the trees, until he accidentally steps on a twig. The women instantly are turned (back) into, um, cows. Understandably, viewers are appalled.

If showing women as cows (actually, the other way around) is dumb, depicting a man secretly, creepily recording a group of ladies in a country where it is a crime is dumber. This act of voyeur-video recording without consent is known as 'molka' - an abbreviation of 'mobile camera' - in Korean. In our reckoning, the cow-women and molka (despite the latter being the basis of hidden-camera sting operations in journalism) depictions are not just offensive, but puzzling. Because by the end of the 52-second video, we genuinely have forgotten what the advertisement is selling. The only way we may remember this is by registering the fact that Seoul Milk has apologised and plugged the stunted publicity stunt.