I SEA, developed by Grey for Good, the philanthropic arm of digital advertising agency Grey Group Singapore, claims to have the ability to scan the Mediterranean Sea for migrant vessels.
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Sources close to the matter tell us that Grey Singapore nearly certainly rushed the app’s release to coincide with both the Cannes Festival and World Refugee Day, which was Monday.
In response to expanding accusations Grey published a statement on their website saying that the app is now in “testing mode” -an odd claim considering it was featured on the Apple Store.
The Daily Dot said the app author had not responded to repeated requests for an explanation. One software developer described “I Sea” as a “terrible fake”. A promotional video for the app, which highlighted thousands of refugee deaths at sea, said the app would “use the power of crowdsourcing to help monitor the vast sea and make an impossible task possible”. In fact, a story about the app appeared in Wired, in which Grey Group’s creative director Low Jun Jek implied that the app was up and running.
“The app promises to show recent or active satellite data and present the user with a way to report the location of suspicious objects (as in, they could be refugees that need help, or just plastic objects in the ocean) to some one (@moas_eu) that can investigate the issue and rescue people”, Keller explained in Twitter direct messages.
In 2011, New Balance was in the heat for its false walking shoe ads that it said helped its users burn calories and tone up when in actual fact studies did not find any special benefits of wearing the shoe.
On World Refugee Day, Grey for Good wants to thank all those who are helping us develop the I SEA app. I SEA – an app developed by Grey for Good in support of MOAS – aims to bring humanitarian and technological efforts together in order to have a concrete impact on the continued refugee crisis at sea.
Some apps are great – others are just false advertisements.
Of course, we might never have learned that the app wasn’t functional if it weren’t for a group of developers, led by Twitter user SecuriTay, who tore down the app to try and see how it all worked. During this testing period, the satellite images available are not in real-time.
The app even won a Bronze medal at this year’s Cannes Lions advertising festival earlier this week.
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Whether or not it does work will only be determined when the app is out of its purported “testing stage”.
