Banning a funny ad? Thanks for the free publicity

By Richard O'hagan
Updated: 10:25 EST, 29 April 2009

There are few guaranteed things in this life. Death is foremost among them. Taxes – and the panic-stricken look they produce on Alistair Darling’s face – would be another.

Freddie Flintoff being injured at the start of a Test series is a third. But a lesser known one is that, several times a year, the Advertising Standards Authority will don a red nose and an outsized pair of shoes just prior to making a complete berk of itself.

This month we have been doubly honoured, because we have been treated to not one but two utterly baffling ASA decisions. It started a couple of weeks ago, when they banned an advert for Courage beer, because it might encourage people to drink.

Given that alcohol advertising is still perfectly legal in this country, I’m not at all certain what the ASA think that most people do with it. Beer is a fluid which is very clearly better suited to being drunk than, say, being used to stick wallpaper to walls or for washing dishes in – which is presumably what happens in the ASA office.

For the benefit of those of you who have not seen it, the advert featured a man sitting on a sofa watching a woman try on a tight-fitting dress, accompanied by the slogan ‘Take Courage.’

It was, for my money, a very clever piece of work. Did the slogan mean that the man should have the courage to tell the woman that the dress was too small, as it appeared to be? Did it mean that he should just grin and bear it when it came to paying for the dress? Or did it mean that he should have the courage to leave what was clearly a protracted shopping trip and go somewhere else, such as the pub?

It matters not, because the ASA thought it meant the man should go out, have a few pints of beer and then come back and do one of the above. That is a decision which, if you think about it, puts one more step into the chain of events than the three most obvious scenarios already dreamt up and which, presumably, says far more about decision making at the ASA than it does anything else.

Then, yesterday, the custard pies and exploding car got another outing, as the ASA banned an advert for Swiftcover Insurance featuring the singer Iggy Pop, on the basis that, at the time, Swiftcover didn’t insure musicians.

We should, I suppose, start by giving the ASA credit for knowing who Iggy Pop is. Still, there are two fundamental flaws in this decision. The first is that they made it on the basis of submissions from the only 12 people in the country gullible enough to think that celebrities actually use the products they endorse. I no more think that Mr Pop is insured by Swiftcover – or that he even knows who he is insured with – than I think that Ringo Starr is insured with Norwich Union (or whatever they are calling themselves this week). And I am pretty damn sure that puppies don’t use toilet paper.

The second flaw is that, even if you think Mr Pop would like to be insured with Swiftcover, would you want to give your cash to a company that willingly insures someone with a well documented history of drug abuse and of slashing himself in public? Me neither. So the advert itself doesn’t really work, anyway.

You see, the tremendous irony of all of this is that, in making such risible decisions, the ASA actually give more publicity to the adverts they try and ban. Ad campaigns have a limited life because the public get bored of them and they become counterproductive as a result – I no longer buy Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, because they kept torturing me with Phil Collins songs.

If the ASA left well alone, eventually everyone would forget. Especially as, in this instance, only a dozen people cared in the first place.

We need the ASA to act as a buffer against truly offensive advertising. We don’t need it to protect the tiny minority who seem unable to think for themselves.