Banned Advertising: The Good, the Bad & the Banned

The good, the badand the bannedrub shoulders inadvertising’s firstcircle of hell as TimCumming looks atthe changing faceof offense and howsome ideas werejust born bad. 

So, how easily offended are you? At what point does the red mist of rage descend? At Kerry Katona hawking payday loans as “fast cash for fast lives” (deemed too irresponsible to broadcast); or at a pubescent girl in skintight American Apparel?

They say the past is a foreign country – and the passport there is its advertising. Here’s what creatives for Kellogg’s came up with in the 1930s: “The harder a wife works, the cuter she looks.” Marlboro cigarettes, 1950s, with a big bouncy baby: “Before you scold me mom, maybe you’d better light up a Marlboro…” Jump forward a decade later, and long-forgotten cancer-stick brand Tipalet promotes itself with the line: “Blow in her face and she’ll follow you anywhere.” Yeah, with a hatchet, pal.

You may think these kinds of transgressions are extinct, but the urge to push boundaries on the playing field of gender exerts a strong pull. Take the recent UK billboard campaign for energy drink Pussy, with its helpful strapline: “The drink’s pure, it’s your mind that’s the problem.” The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) didn’t think so. It ruled that the poster was sexually explicit and offensive, and that it was unsuitable to be placed where children might see it. Not that the furore had a negative impact on sales. From 200,000 cans per month, Pussy was soon hitting more than half a million. In response to the ASA’s ruling, the brand defended itself by pointing to the OED’s definition of the word ‘pussy’, compared the ban to the banning of the Sex Pistols in the 1970s, and queried the complaints from certain religious people (which were not upheld by the ASA) on the grounds that ‘the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats’.

Whoever drafted that reply, I’d wager, had quite a lot of fun.

On the offensive

Elsewhere, the casual racism we like to think we left behind with The Black & White Minstrel Show can still rear-end us – sometimes at the biggest advertising jamboree of the year, the Super Bowl. Volkswagen’s Game Day spot from Deutsch LA drew ire for its depiction of people being so happy they speak in a Jamaican accent. Is a stereotype a racist stereotype when it’s positive? And as one commentator pointed out, how happy are Jamaicans anyway? Corruption, violence and poverty aren’t the party-starters the folks at Volkswagen may have thought of when Game Day went into production.

A bigger blowback came as a result of a TVC for Mountain Dew, a beverage concocted by PepsiCo, which withdrew its spot featuring rap group Odd Future, its leader, Tyler, The Creator, a talking goat, and a bruised, battered woman weeping with fear as the goat, voiced by Tyler, warns her to “Keep your mouth shut. I’m gonna get outta here and I’m gonna ‘dew’ you up”. American writer Boyce Watkins called the spot, created by Tyler’s own branding agency Camp Flog Gnaw “arguably the most racist commercial in history” (he evidently has never seen the late-80s branding for Darkie Toothpaste in Asia, then) while PepsiCo blubbed to Adweek that “We understand how this video could be perceived by some as offensive, and we apologise to those who were offended.”

Another area you’d think would have gone beyond the pale – the sexualisation of the young, for example, is also still with us. A 1970s shocker from BabySoft (“that irresistible clean-baby smell, grown up enough to be sexy”) came with the headline “because innocence is sexier than you think”. You’d think that no brand or agency today would dare to tread such a line. Not when your brand’s name is American Apparel. In 2012, it was the subject of several rulings from the ASA. It was accused of sexualising children in one advert, which depicted a girl modelling a T-shirt through which you could see her breasts. “Because her breasts were visible through her shirt,” wrote the ASA, “we considered the images could be seen to sexualise a model who appeared to be a child.” The brand wasn’t really having that, replying that their models were most certainly of age, and had modelled for Vice magazine. “We’ll abide by this ruling as we have in the past with similar ASA decisions,” the brand continued, “but American Apparel will not be altering our classic advertising aesthetic which is internationally recognised for its artistic and social values.”

You shouldn’t do that

Brands and creatives play with the forbidden, with the taboo – whether it be gender stereotyping, or levels of sex or violence – because if you get it right, get the audience on side, the results can be memorable, as some brilliant ads for Lynx/Axe have shown. Get it wrong, however, and all hell breaks loose. Take the recent furore over a viral for Hyundai’s new zero-emissions car. Pipe Job aired on Innocean Europe’s YouTube channel in April, apparently without Hyundai’s knowledge or approval. It depicts a man attempting suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning but failing due to the Hyundai 1X35’s “100 per cent water emissions”. It was, the agency later claimed in a statement posted on WordPress, “hyperbole to dramatise a product advantage, culminating in a positive outcome. Clearly, we were mistaken, and we sincerely apologise.”

Copywriter Holly Brockwell’s father committed suicide in this manner, and her blog response to Pipe Job highlights the unintended impact of powerful images. “The ad starts innocuously. It wasn’t until I saw the pipe going into the taped-up window that I felt ice run through my veins... As a creative, I usually view ads from an objective standpoint, but in this case it was impossible. I would have to be made of stone to watch someone parodying the exact way my dad died and dispassionately ask whether it gets the brand message across.”

Sense, sensibility and censorship

Innocean, understandably, is keen to bury Pipe Job like so much toxic waste, but as we all know, it’s harder to take stuff off the internet than it is to post it on. As soon as they saw the reaction it was causing and the potential damage it could have on the brand, they set about pulling it – just days after it was picked by The Drum and The Guardian as an ad of the week. Indeed, it was only when Brockwell blogged about it (see box, page 74) that Innocean Europe understood the scale of the reaction was quite beyond what had been anticipated. “We recognise we misjudged sentiment with the video,” Innocean told us for this article. “There’s a fine line between provocative and inappropriate. The moment we realised the video had caused offence, we did everything we could to remove it from the public domain. We have expressed our regret for the distress caused, and have learned a huge amount from the experience.”

As a copywriter, Brockwell understands the pressure to make an impact can lead to unintentionally offensive content. “We’re all under incredible pressure to make shareable, viral content for clients, and the fact is, offensive or controversial ads DO get attention. I’d imagine in this case they expected lots of debate and only some condemnation. It took someone who’s actually lost a parent to suicide to point out how tasteless and unnecessary it was.”

The web is seen as the final frontier of open content, but even there, censorship can kick into play – if only by algorithm. Take the case of Jeppe Ronde’s Come4: The Lover from BEING Paris. The online spot is for a user-generated, non-profit porn site for people with disabilities, and it challenged oft-held assumptions about sex and disability. “The only people who had issues with it was YouTube,” says Alasdhair MacGregor of BEING. “We’d been sending the link to the media, and it stopped working. One of my creatives came up in a panic saying, ‘Oh my god, they’ve taken it off YouTube’.” Was this censorship, or just a cock-up? “They either have an algorithm,” says MacGregor, “or an underpaid intern goes through all the material they get and as soon as they see naked breasts, they take it off.” Neither MacGregor nor Ronde heard directly from YouTube, but it didn’t stay down for long. Within two days of The Guardian publishing an article about it, Come4: The Lover was up again.

Some brands positively revel in stoking target audiences with controversial messages. This doesn’t have to make them pariahs. “It’s hard to reach very many people by handing out leaflets, so we must be creative, which is why we often use humour, sex, shock tactics and gimmickry to reach a populace bombarded with paid advertising from industries that are selling wares that harm animals.” This is PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), whose latest in-house campaign, Veggie Love, was banned from the Super Bowl this year. So what’s the problem? And is it true, as some commentators claim, that PETA produces Super Bowl spots with the expectation of having them banned, then talked about, and viewed – and all without having to shell out the $3.5m it costs to run?

Not so, says Ben Williams from the campaign group’s London offices. “PETA US has had a donor willing to fork out the cost of a Super Bowl ad for some years now,” he says. “Although the group has not managed to get any ad run, even a mild one featuring Joaquin Phoenix going shopping, the creation of the ads does bring millions of viewers to the website to see the ads.”

NBC claimed that Veggie Love “depicts a level of sexuality exceeding [the network’s] standards.” This is not how PETA remembers it. “The sales rep whom PETA US dealt with at NBC was initially excited about that commercial, so the group was shocked to receive her email rejection, which was actually a lot more graphic in its description of the ad than the ad itself was.”

Veggie Love, featuring a photogenic, if not pornographic, root crop with even more photogenic (but not pornographic) star names, is sexy and provocative – like a lot of ads you see during the Super Bowl. So was it the message – don’t exploit animals – that stuck in the network’s craw? “Competing advertising for fast food is clearly one reason – perhaps the only reason – for this spot being turned down,” suggests PETA. “Fast-food giant KFC is a major NBC sponsor and a target of heavy PETA US campaigning as a result of its failure to reform cruel animal welfare practices and crude slaughter methods.”

Although no animals were hurt in its making, Wrigley’s Dog Breath chalked up the record number of complaints made against an advert in the UK – 700 – for its audacious CGI of man’s best friend crawling out of a comatose party-goer’s morning breath. Two years later, KFC bettered that with call-centre workers singing with their mouths full. If that was enough to put you off your chicken bucket, the go-to guys to register a complaint with in the UK is the ASA. It’s not an office that’s short of work.

“We take seriously all complaints that we receive,” says the ASA’s Matt Wilson, “but it doesn’t automatically mean there is a problem or that we will launch an investigation. It’s about judging whether the complaints we receive justifies us taking action.” It’s not about how many complaints you get, either. “We don’t play a numbers game. Just one complaint can lead to investigation which can ultimately result in an ad being banned.”

And while we might instinctively expect boundaries, especially in the digital age, to be pushed further back when it comes to what is and is not permissible, it’s those old bugbears of religion, sex and the depiction of women that remain the most common cause for outrage. As Wilson says, “When you compare, say, the famous Benetton ad campaigns from the 90s with the imagery we see in ads today, are modern day ads any more provocative or ‘offensive’ than that?”

Ads behaving badly

Some adverts are made with the expectation of controversy, but end up being showered more with awards than with opprobrium. Such was the case with Nando’s Last Dictator Standing campaign, helmed by director Dean Blumberg and creative director Ahmed Tilly at Black River FC. “We were aware that the spot would create controversy locally and abroad,” says Blumberg. “The very nature of ‘autocracy’ means that the deconstruction of governing bodies is not permitted, so controversy was inevitable. This made each decision powerful because every nuance would have a dramatic consequence.”

Featuring look-a-likes of Mugabe and Gaddafi, as well Amin, De Klerk and Saddam, the spot was eventually pulled from Zimbabwe “in the interest of the safety of Nando’s staff and customers there,” says Tilly, as a result of protests by youth groups loyal to Mugabe. “We never expected the kind of reaction the spot received,” he adds. “I don’t think anyone anticipated threats of violence as a reaction to an ad. Perhaps we were naive not to think it.”

When it comes to what is, or isn’t offensive, Blumberg believes the biggest shift is in “what people are willing to do to get noticed... The big game changer has been the internet. Before, a banned commercial meant the graveyard for a company’s spend. Now, living as a dirty pleasure on the net is not only viable but brilliant for word of mouth, longevity and bragging rights.

“For me, nothing is off-limits,” he adds. “No topic of human kind is beyond some form of analysis and scrutiny, whether you use humour, opinion-driven rhetoric or dramatic representation. The real issue is your intention. If the intention is to be solely malicious and offend, I believe you can take any subject off-limits.”