ASA - please ban my ads too
16th Apr 2008
By Chris Tomlinson
Making an ad for prime time television can cost you an arm and a leg and by the time you've bought enough airtime for it to make an impact you'll be completely limbless.
Unless of course the Advertising Standards Authority save you most the broadcast costs by banning your ad after its first airing!
Before the internet, an adverse ASA ruling was very bad news indeed, leaving you with a very expensive ad no one was going to see.
But now we have YouTube and an ASA ban is the golden ticket to a bigger audience than most brands could ever dream of.
Recently, the ASA banned an ad for a hair curling product, the ghd IV, from a company called Jamella. Now I've never heard of them before. A brief glance at the accompanying photograph should explain my lack of knowledge on the hair care market place.
However, now the ghd ad has been banned, I find myself writing about it!
The story and the ad have gone viral in a way only the web could pull off and inadvertently so has the awareness of the product.
It only took 26 people to complain to the ASA to get the ad banned. Admittedly one of them was the Archdeacon of Liverpool, who I discover, thanks to Google images, is also follicularly challenged.
The ad, which you are no doubt going to watch online yourself after reading this, features several provocatively dressed models praying for better hair and the less wholesome results it might bring.
It was banned due to the use of a phrase from the Lord's Prayer and religious icons such as beads and candles which could apparently prove offensive to Christians, bald or otherwise.
But thanks to the internet, you can still watch the series of three ads and judge for yourself. There are also now several more shocking spoof versions, uploaded by pranksters, giving even power to the brand whose ad has sparked a cult following.
I'm not clear whether the ASA's authority extends to online, but if it does, there would be little practical hope of removing the original ad from the web.
This is the true power of the modern web - you cannot seek to control the way its citizens treat your brand messages. It's a tough thing for marketers to do, but letting go of control is the only way to gain brand equity in a web 2.0 world.
As traditional broadcast media fragments - there are now hundreds of commercial television channels - it is becoming increasingly hard for brands to know which advertising slots will suit their products.
So making a video content specifically for the web is looking like an increasingly attractive option.
Better still, you can get some real measurement on its success, such as the actual number of people who watched it and demographic information on where they are.
But if you really want to get best return on your video production investment, pray that the ASA bans your ad!
Chris Tomlinson is Head of Digital at WAA.
Comments on this article
Chris Tomlinson commented 3 weeks ago
Ian has a point. But my point was that the YouTube route has no 100K per minute , broadcast costs and will accumulate 8million viewers over time.
Ian Murdock commented 4 weeks ago
Surely it would be smarter to make a good ad that gets plenty of hits online and isn't banned. The Sony Bravia paint ads for example have thousands of hits on youtube, spawned hundreds of spoofs and did very well on tv.
I think you'll find that the ghd adverts on youtube were getting lots of hits before the ad was banned, some versions have been up for over 5 months.
Personally i would much have my ad banned and enjoy a tv audience of 8 million (typical coronation street audience) than get lost in those numerous online channels and get a mere 30k viewers.