“You want to squeeze my buttocks together to make one juicy, giant peach.” – Pete Tranter’s Sister
“Wear our shoes and you can have a squeezable, bite-able ass like this,” is the fairly unsubtle message from these Reebok adverts for EasyTone Curve trainers.
Sadly the Advertising Standards Authority disagreed – having made Anne Widdicombe walk around the shoes for a month (that’s not quite true) – and promptly banned the ad as its claims that the shoes help “tone legs and bum” is not proven.
Reebok said that independent studies showed that the trainers tone bums and calves, but the ASA ruled that the sample size of the study was too small to support the absolute claims made in the ads and ordered that the ads could not be repeated in their previous form.
The ASA said: “Because we considered that we had not seen robust, scientific evidence to support the efficacy claims made in the magazine ad or the TV ad, we concluded that the claims had not been substantiated and were misleading.
A spokeswoman for Reebok defended the brand thus: “EasyTone shoes use balance ball-inspired technology. Balance balls are used in gyms around the world and the benefits of this type of training are well documented. Despite these two complaints to the ASA, thousands of consumers have told us they love our shoes and that they work. For us, that’s the most powerful evidence.”
So, presumably, everyone at Reebok got back to investigating the pert, nubile backsides of models in preparation for a new edit. Nice work if you can get it.
Have a look at the adverts below and see if you can estimate the ass-to-trainer ratio. We know which we’d prefer looking at.
NB. This all happened a while ago but the adverts have required extensive and intensive study to produce this post