Chris’ Blog

Chris’ Blog …. on a report of the Advertising Standards Authority’s banning of posters from Young’s

Reading through the advertising news earlier this week, I saw quite an interesting pairing in one publication. On one page was a report on the Advertising Standards Authority’s banning of two posters from Young’s featuring a young man dressed in white and wearing a ram’s head, with the tag line, “This is a Ram’s World” and a rather scantily-dressed woman nearby (as reported in the marketing news pages of the drinks business February issue). The ASA said this poster, and another one in the campaign, where the same creature is in the middle of a clubbable room, surrounded by men in pin stripes, “depicted the ram at the centre of social attention and were likely to be seen as linking alcohol with social success”.

Personally, I think it should have been banned on the basis that it was just rubbish. It was slightly puerile, pretty poor punning and generally awful execution. If I were Young’s I would not only be spending time with the ASA, working out an alternative and acceptable execution, but also working out which berk was responsible for wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds on it.

However, just below this story was a report about Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff being signed up for a second campaign for Thwaites brewery. “We signed Andrew pre-Ashes because he is a Lancashire lad and everyone in the area was already rightly proud of him and he fitted the character and values of the product.” The product being Bomber ale.

What will be interesting is how the ASA reacts to a figure such as Flintoff being the face of Bomber. Because if we’re honest, Flintoff hasn’t exactly been a great advertisement for sobriety and self-restraint since he helped England romp to victory in the Ashes. The 36-hour drinking session that he and his team-mates went on after their victory was understandable, but perhaps a little over the top and a little over-documented by the tabloid photographers for someone who is more or less a hero to young cricket-playing teenagers both male and female.

Now I haven’t seen the posters that Thwaites have planned yet, and I am pretty sure that Mr Flintoff is actually sober 99% of the time like most people, and doesn’t abuse alcohol. However, given his reputation, it’s going to be hard to put him in a poster ad alongside an alcoholic drink, and not have the ASA draw the conclusion that the most impressionable group in our society – the “youf of today” could easily draw: namely that Flintoff + 36-hour binge + Bomber is an acceptable combination. Let’s face it: it doesn’t strike one as nearly as bizarre as a bloke wearing a Ram’s head being accused of encouraging people to think of alcohol as a key to peer success. It actually strikes one as a hell of a lot more possible even if does bear absolutely no relation to the truth.

The truth is, strip away the ability to stick a man with a ram’s head in the middle of an ad with an appalling pun, strip away the ability to use stars like Flintoff to punt your product, and you strip away an advertising team’s two main areas of bona fide concrete chargeability, namely bad humour and easy celebrity endorsement – both great cash cows on all fronts. Which means they will have to revert to something that is talked about often in the advertising industry but rarely in existence: creativity and original thought. Chris Orr January 2006