An online marketing campaign by US chain American Apparel has been branded gratuitous by the ad watchdog after it investigated a single complaint that the series of ads – featuring semi-naked young women – was “pornographic and exploitative”.
The company ran eight ads promoting socks, underwear and sweaters on its website, and one in Crack, a free lifestyle magazine, featuring women in various states of undress, some topless.
The Advertising Standards Authority launched an inquiry after receiving the complaint that the images were “offensive … pornographic, exploitative of women and inappropriately sexualised young women”.
But American Apparel arguing that the images featured “real, non-airbrushed, everyday people” who were mainly “not professional models”. The company, which argued that the young women were “clearly in their 20s”, said that it believed the images were the type that “people regularly share with their friends on social networks and which normal people could relate to”.
American Apparel also tried to argue the images fell outside of the remit of the ASA because they were “heritage advertising”, and not actually part of a current campaign.
However, the ASA ruled that the nudity was “gratuitous” because most of the clothes modelled were not lingerie, and yet the shots of breasts and buttocks were the “focal points of the images rather than the products”.
The watchdog added that the “voyeuristic and amateurish quality to the images… served to heighten the impression that the ads were exploitative of women and inappropriately sexualised young women”.
Banning all but one ad, the ASA ruled that the ads had not been prepared with a “sense of responsibility to consumers and to society”.
