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Public Service announcements have come a long way since Smokey the Bear sternly assigned us all with the task of preventing forest fires and Woodsy the Owl asked us to “Give a hoot, don’t pollute!”

Nowadays, the trend is toward edgy, “Look at me!”-type spots designed more to generate buzz than to deliver a message. This is exemplified by two new environmental spots (via AdFreak) that are so wrong, they’re just…wrong.

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On Tuesday, Mediaite reported that the World Wildlife Fund denied responsibility for an offensive ad that featured an image of multiple planes headed for the Twin Towers. Now, Ad Age is reporting that WWF has revealed that although the ad was created on spec, it was run once in a local Brazilian newspaper:

Apart from the current discussion about the GMail failure, Twitter is also ablaze with outrage over an extremely tasteless World Wildlife Fund ad that overtly exploits the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11/2001. Mediaite has learned, exclusively, that the ad was not commissioned by WWF, but rather, was a pitch that they rejected. From WWF’s forthcoming statement: