The Good, the Bad and the Banned
Should advertisers push boundaries to push ideas and products? Tim Cumming explores in this excerpt from shots 144.
The good, the bad and the banned rub shoulders in advertising’s first circle of hell as TimCumming looks at the changing face of offense and how some ideas were just 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.
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