PaddyPower gets a bollocking over transgender ads
As predicted, PaddyPower has duly had a wrist-slap from the ASA over its 'guess the tranny' game, after 92 complaints were lodged (collected stuff on PaddyPower adverts here)
Hilariously PaddyPower claimed it meant no offence and rejected the claim that it reinforced negative stereotypes.
As it has pointed out before, PaddyPower asked the Beaumont Group, apparently a leading transgender group in the UK, and apparently received the thumbs-up. The reality was rather more complicated.
The ASA disagreed with virtually everything PaddyPower had to say, judging that the ad:
trivialised a complex and difficult issue and objectified
depicted... negative stereotypes in a way that was also likely to be seriously offensive to trans people;
was likely to cause serious offence;
trivialised a highly complex issue and depicted a number of common negative stereotypes about trans people;
irresponsibly reinforced... negative stereotypes;
condoned and encouraged harmful discriminatory behaviour and treatment;
breached BCAP Code rule 4.2 (Harm and offence);
breached BCAP Code rules 1.2 (Social responsibility).
The ad must not be shown in public again, but it's all a bit stable door and bolted horse, really. Advertisers understand this and play the system so that they can run offensive ads and reap subsequent infamy from the resulting news stories.
What does PaddyPower have up its sleeve next, I wonder?
NB. Read the full judgement here
You vomit, you save; you wank, you save
Nothing much more to say about this apart from how much I utterly despise it. I'm saving while going about my daily business am I? Well, fuck me, I'm glad I now understand how simple interest works. Better stop going into the bank every day to remind them to pay me my .045p interest.
Youtube Likes to Dislikes: 12 to 134
Here's Santander's previous effort - now deemed 'too corporate' and, presumably, 'not hideously annoying enough'. Lovely music (Wild Beasts) and a neat, slightly dreamlike visual metaphor. Loses marks for the faux-folksy 'hello' though.
Youtube Likes to Dislikes: 111 to 14
Dulux breastmilk-expressing advert
Someone who had recently given birth once told me that, upon hearing a baby cry, her breasts would leak milk, presumably as some sort of unconscious, primitive maternal stimulus (wonder of motherhood, blah fucking blah).
That strikes me as being an unedifying position to be in, at the whims of whatever brats are in the vicinity and requiring a spare blouse at any given time of the day, though I suspect that most women who have given birth are rather nonplussed by the idea of embarrassment at unintentional milk spillage, having had various people prod their vaginas and sew them up again after a small screaming red thing has emerged from the part of them normally reserved for their partner's penis (or turkey-baster).
Anyway, the point is that the sound of a baby screaming has unfortunate ramifications. For new mothers, surprise lactation. For absolutely everyone else, pain on a level similar to receiving anesthetic-free root-canal surgery.
The sound of a child screaming is the most awful noise known to man, worse even that the noise of Piers Morgan having a wank or Janet Street-Porter being bummed.
It's a noise designed to do something to us – as animals who got ideas above our station – on a primal level. It demands that we do something about it. You can't fight it. It's like being scared of heights; it's like wanting to have sex with beautiful members of the opposite sex; it's like being disgusted by George Osborne's face. It's built into us.
I've not made up my mind whether Dulux knows about this or not. A charitable reading is that the people who made this ad simply thought it was a clever juxtaposition. A more sinister reading suggests that the people who made this advert know exactly what they're doing; annoying the living fuck out of people in order to make a more memorable advert.
Halfords had an ad over Christmas with a young girl screaming all the way though it – and I wondered whether we'd have a raft of baby-scream ads, delivering precision-guided primal shocks to your very core.
If it is deliberate there's only way to go after this – an ultrasonic non-lethal weapon that makes people vomit up their spleens. That'd be memorable, eh?
Paddypower redux: Private Eye
Private Eye is, of course, excellent. It's a satirical and investigative and gossipy political mag in the UK that I've bought for years because it's irresistible, like an upmarket version of Heat for political / media geeks.
It has columns on lots of different things: advertising, railways, TV, books, the media, politics and so on. It also runs a column on advertising, Ad Nauseam, on advertising and shenanigans in the industry. I guess it's written by someone within - or previously within - the industry because whoever writes it certainly gets something of an inside track.
I was interested to read the following about Paddy Power and its recent run of ads, clearly intending to be controversial for the Hell of it, that culminated in the Gregos Traitorelli ad. I disliked this ad because it's so obviously intended to push the envelope of what's acceptable - along with all its other recent ads.
Lots of people have been leaving lots of witless 'get a sense of humour mate' comments that shows that they can't be arsed to actually think about the issues or they're too stupid to. The issue for me is this: deliberately courting controversy by flirting with offensive issues like race, class, animal cruelty and gender issues. I find it vaguely pathetic, in the way that I find it pathetic that largely middle-class journos write inflammatory stuff in the knowledge that thick readers get off an some casual racism or homophobia with a healthy side serving of big tits.
It plays people for being stupid. It works the system (in this case what's considered acceptable in the world of advertising) simply to gain a flash of notoriety. The Gregos Traitorelli ad is flirting with race issues to make you put a ten-pound bet on Balotelli scoring a goal.
But don't just take my word for it. Read what Private Eye has to say on the subject - and ask yourself is this is all quite as innocent as you might think.
Several companies have used an advertising strategy that involves goading regulators with risque ads to receive free publicity. Other advertisers end to loathe the self-styled mavericks, because they prove that adland's cosy self-regulatory system lacks teeth, thus threatening the whole edifice.
First French Connection was the bad boy, followed by Ryanair. Now it would appear bookmaker Paddy Power is taking up the mantle.
In late 2010 it ran a TV ad featuring blind footballers kicking a cat
. When that received more complaints than any other ad that year, the free publicity penny seems to have dropped. Since then the cheeky Irish pranksters have run topical ads featuring the footballer Luis Suarez after he received an eight-match ban for racial abuse; a spot entitled Lady's Day asking viewers to pick out the 'stallions' from the 'mares' at a race day; and an internet-only ad featuring a man shooting 'chavs' with a tranquiliser gun at the Cheltenham Festival. Its latest spot features a man who placed a bet against his own team renaming himself Gregos Traitorelli, relocating to Greece and supporting a team called Athletico Kebab. You might expect this kind of stuff from Paddy Power by now, but its agency, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, should know better