Last year a gorilla called Bokito attacked a woman in the Rotterdam zoo, presumably because she had behaved herself aggressively by staring at the animal and grinning at it. Advertising agency DDB came up with a campaign for insurance company FBTO which resulted in the handing out of 2,000 of these Bokito-proof glasses that lets you look at a gorilla directly while seemingly looking away. Nice case of gorilla marketing (pun intended).

(Image source unknown, presumably one of the two companies mentioned above. Link: BoingBoing.)

Illustration: Houses at Efteling in Anton Pieck style, photo by Danny Haak. Some rights reserved. 

Amusement park Efteling is still the most visited attraction in the Netherlands according to RTL (Dutch). The zoos at the number two and three spots of 2006 changed places last year; Blijdorp came in second, and Burgers third. Burgers feels the swap can be explained by the extra attention Blijdorp got after gorilla Bokito escaped there.

Efteling suffered a blow in another ranking though: that of strongest brand of the Netherlands. Where it led two years ago, now it has to let foreign companies Ikea (1st) and Google (2nd) ahead. The North Brabant-based amusement park comes in fourth, according to the ad agency Consult Brand Strategy (Dutch, PDF), after Cliniclowns (care clowns).

In 1952 Efteling opened its doors to the public. The park was designed by Anton Pieck, whose pictures of small winding streets with crooked, cosy houses found a welcome echo in the park’s architecture and landscaping. Originally little more than a tea house in green surroundings, the park soon added its fairy tale forest with life size depictions of well known fairy tales (trick question: name three of the seven dwarfs from Snow White), and from the 1970s onwards it acquired all the usual amusement park traits such as dark rides, fast rides, a hotel and a golf course.

Bokito is no longer that world-famous gorilla that broke out of its pen at the Rotterdam Zoo (Diergaarde Blijdorp) last week, it is also a brand name with CDs, printed materials, clothing and advertising, although the gorilla already had its own clothing line at bokitoshop.nl (which from what I can gather, is under construction). Some other advertising features Bokito plugging potatoes. The zoo is trying to stop this madness by forcing the potato folks to stop. And people at the pub are talking about how terrible it is for people to profit from other people’s misery. Ironically, the Dutch have a word for that, ‘leedvermaak’ (roughly, malicious pleasure).

(Link: zibb)

So, what was that lesson many children learn about not teasing animals? No wait, not only did children apparently throw rocks at the gorilla, but the woman who was attacked and bitten had stared down the animal in a way you’re not supposed to, according to the zoo’s staff. She claimed that when she laughed, the gorilla seemed to laugh back, but in fact, this was a facial expression denoting “I’m gonna get you if you keep doing that”.

(Link: Dag)

Yesterday afternoon, in the Rotterdam Zoo (Diergaarde Blijdorp), the almost adult gorilla male Bokito escaped from his pen (crib? pad?) and basically attacked a woman by biting her. Then, he popped over to the terrace of the Oewanja restaurant at the zoo and totally freaked people out. An employee of the restaurant was (is still?) in shock and the zoo is offering victim help. How this happened is as yet unknown. The fact that he could swim and cross the moat in his pen/crib/pad is a mystery to the keepers, as they say gorillas cannot swim. Maybe this is a real Dutch water gorilla.

Moral of the story: we cage up wild animals for our own pleasure and we don’t like it when they take off and attack people.

(Link: Diergaarde Blijdorp, via Netherlands Post)