ASA branded woke for axing Fred West Father's Day ad

An events company, backed by two stars from BBC’s Dragons’ Den, has branded the ad watchdog “the woke mob” after being censured over a marketing campaign that used serial killer Fred West to promote its “Post-Mortem Live” experience.

ITAE Productions was launched by Sam and Judith Piri after securing financial backing from Deborah Meaden and Peter Jones in 2018. It markets itself as an educational business specialising in delivering live anatomical dissection events for both the public and education institutions.

In June this year, the firm sent out a Father’s Day email marketing campaign headlined “She’s under the patio”, featuring a picture of Fred West. Text underneath stated, “This week we take a look at the Fathers famous for all the wrong reasons … Fred West became known in the 1990s when it was revealed him and his wife, Rosemary, were involved in 12 murders of young women in Gloucester.

“One of their victims was their own daughter…when she was missing they would often joke of her being ‘buried under the patio’.” It then urged recipients to get a 10% discount using a special code and a button stated “Read the Fred West blog here”. The ad also featured an image of a dead body cut open through the stomach with its organs visible.

But, perhaps unsurprisingly, it did not go down too well with some, and three complainants challenged whether the ad was likely to cause serious or widespread offence, triggering an Advertising Standards Authority investigation.

In response to the ASA inquiry, ITAE Productions said it did not believe the ad was offensive, insisting that while Fred West was notorious for murder, he was also a father, and that this was relevant to his crimes.

The firm said it considered it to be socially acceptable to share history that was relevant to occasions when there was a factual or direct link between the two, which in this case they believed to be Fred West’s crimes and Father’s Day.

ITAE went on to claim that the death of Jesus Christ and the promotion of products over the Easter period was comparative to the strategy it had employed in the ad.

The firm also defended the use of the headline “She’s under the patio” as, it claimed, the phrase was synonymous with the case, and, as such, it would engage audiences and give them an understanding of the content included in the email.

However, the ASA took a dim view of the campaign, and while it acknowledged that the audience was made up of those who had previously attended a live dissection event, the reference to Fred West was not in itself relevant when promoting a Father’s Day discount code to be used against future ITAE events.

The watchdog maintained that there was no convincing connection between Fred West and Father’s Day, nor did it consider his status as a father relevant to being included in any Father’s Day marketing communications.

Rather, readers would likely interpret this as a celebration of a serial killer and rapist and that any celebration of such actions was likely to be distressing. It further considered that this distress would have been heightened in view of Fred West’s own actions as a father, and particularly for those who may have experienced abuse from a family member.

In fact, the ASA believed that conflating Fred West with the celebration of Father’s Day was intended to create shock value and contributed to the ad’s offensive nature.

The watchdog added: “We considered that using the murder of a young woman, in order to shock readers into clicking on the ad, was gratuitous and likely to cause serious offence. Furthermore, we considered the tone of the ad was flippant, and that this approach trivialised the circumstances surrounding the murder of the victims, as well as making light of distressing and serious crimes. Consequently, we considered that the ad did not treat Fred West’s victims with respect or sensitivity.

“For those reasons, we concluded the ad was likely to cause unjustified distress and serious and widespread offence. The ad must not appear again in its current form.”

But ITAE Productions is having none of it. In a statement, CEO Sam Piri said that the firm had come under fire from the woke mod and added: “ITAE Productions have been cooperative and compliant with the ASA CAP code and continue to do so, I am calling for a route and branch overview of how the ASA operates, with subjective rulings, no publicly available thresholds or trigger points for breaches, no consideration of context and no right of appeal the whole system seems to operate like something from the former Soviet Russian era.

“I fear for other live acts if three people can trigger these rulings that drain significant resources to deal with, at a time when businesses are under pressure from Covid recovery and facing immense pressure from inflation and cost of living crises. The whole thing seems really unfair and puts on a trajectory to a rather dull and drab society devoid of culture, innovation and comedy as not to offend anybody.”

TOPICS:ad regulation ASA experiential marketing