U-turn fuels St John Ambulance ban

The ad watchdog has made a dramatic U-turn over a controversial ad campaign for St John Ambulance – featuring a man choking to death – by banning the commercial a year after rejecting nearly 150 complaints about it.
The TV ad, devised by Bartle Bogle Hegarty, first launched in September 2012, and was designed to encourage people to learn first aid.
It showed a man going through treatment for cancer and recovering, only to then choke at a barbecue.
On-screen text at the end of the commercial went on to claim: “First aid could help prevent up to 140,000 deaths every year. The same number of people that die from cancer.”
Despite being the most complained about charity ad of the year, it swerved a ban in November 2012, when the Advertising Standards Authority ruled its post-9pm restriction justified its airing. But St John Ambulance was challenged once again by independent organisation Full Fact, which queried how figures used had been compiled.
Full Fact asked the ASA to reinvestigate the ad, over whether the claim that “First aid could help prevent up to 140,000 deaths every year” could be substantiated.
In its defence, St John Ambulance said it used a mixture of mortality data from the Office of National Statistics and its own first aid manual to calculate the instances where knowledge of first aid death could have improved a person’s chance of survival, giving a total of 139,907. It then cross-referenced this with cancer mortality figures from Cancer Research UK, which showed there were 137,999 cancer deaths in England and Wales.
However, the charity could not provide figures of the total number of deaths that could realistically be prevented if first aid skills were universal in society.
Concluding that the 140,000 figure was misleading, the ASA banned the ad and warned St John Ambulance against using the figure its future advertising.