Akademiks Ads Pulled In New York

The Hip-Hop clothing line Akademiks is causing controversy in New York over their racy poster ads that state: “Read Books, Get Brain.”Enraged New York City transit officials are taking action, vowing to pull the ads from city buses.”Get Brain” is slang for oral sex and the ad deliberatly played on the meaning.Akademiks’ ad designer Anthony […]

The Hip-Hop clothing line Akademiks is causing controversy in New York over their racy poster ads that state: “Read Books, Get Brain.”Enraged New York City transit officials are taking action, vowing to pull the ads from city buses.”Get Brain” is slang for oral sex and the ad deliberatly played on the meaning.Akademiks’ ad designer Anthony Harrison told the New York Daily News the “Read Books, Get Brain” catchphrase also appears in English, Spanish and Japanese.”We knew this,” Harrison told the Daily News. “It’s coded language, city slang. Teens know what it means but the general public doesn’t.”>In one poster, a boy is reading with a half-dressed girl sitting on his lap and another ad features a curvaceous, scantily-clad woman on her knees, holding an open book but not reading it.MTA officials, unaware of the street jargon, have posted the ads on the sides of 200 city buses since September according to an Akademiks spokesperson.Officials have declared that they would remove the ads from city buses, and condemned Akademiks for deceiving them.Several malls have refused to display the ads, while other ads are running on buses and bus shelters in Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco and Philadelphia, Akademiks officials said.