A poster campaign for an e-cigarette brand which was branded “ignorant and idiotic” has been stubbed out after suggesting that a relationship between a young black man and an elderly white woman was still taboo.
The campaign, for Nicofresh, was devised by Bloom in Belfast and launched in May. It depicted the couple cuddling up on a sofa under the strapline “No tobacco. No taboo”.
The agency received a number of negative comments on its website almost immediately after posting up the campaign in a blog. One stated: “Inter-racial couples are not a taboo and I cannot believe a campaign in 2014 would suggest such a thing. Please consider this before you launch this campaign any further. It is ignorant and idiotic.”
Meanwhile another wrote: “I am an oldish Caucasian female and my partner is a younger black male. Can you guess how I feel when driving past your offensive billboard. Each time I see it for some reason it angers me more. The sooner this board is removed the sooner my happiness will be restored. Is this 2014 or 1954?”
There were also a number of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority, which launched an investigation.
In its defence, the company said the campaign was based on the observation that cigarette smoking is now considered “taboo”. And it added that it “could not be denied that relationships between two people of different races, or age groups, had, within living memory, been subject to social taboo status”.
However, it claimed the message of the ad was an “entirely positive one”.
Needless to say, the ASA took a slightly different view, believing that consumers looking at the ad would think a relationship between an older and younger individual and a couple of different races was something that was “unusual or socially unacceptable”.
It added: “Because of that, we concluded that the ad was likely to cause serious or widespread offence on the grounds of race and age.”
Ruling that the ad must not appear again in its current form, the regulator warned Nicofresh to ensure its marketing communications did not contain anything that was likely to cause serious or widespread offence in future, and to take particular care to avoid causing offence on the grounds of race or age.
In February, a TV ad for e-cigarette brand VIP – which featured a sultry model seemingly offering the viewer oral sex – was banned by the ad watchdog after becoming one of the most complained about ads in history.
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RT @DM_editor: Is this 2014 or 1954? ‘Ignorant, idiotic’ e-cig ad snuffed out http://t.co/c3M5UYp03f #advertising http://t.co/LKQwJsIPut