Watchdog howls at explict email

An email marketing campaign targeting X-Box Fifa 14 players has been blasted by the ad watchdog for using imagery that would make Sepp Blatter look like a radical feminist.
Even Blatter, who once suggested that female footballers should wear skimpier shorts, would not have gone as far as FIFA4Coins.com, which offers gamers the chance to buy coins to purchase players in the Electronic Arts video game.
The company sent six marketing emails featuring a series of graphic images, which showed women each holding a football in a variety of poses.
In some of the images, the women were naked and their body was painted to give the appearance that they wore a sports kit. In others, the women wore sports clothing tailored to partially reveal their breasts or underwear, and were posed in a sexually provocative way. The ads had not been targeted over and above the email recipients’ subscription to the advertisers’ database as a result of previous purchases.
One recipient was decidedly unimpressed and rifled off a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority, challenging whether the ads were offensive, because they were explicit and objectified women.
However FIFA4Coins.com did not even bother to respond to the ASA inquiry, which earned the firm its first rebuke as that in itself is a breach of the CAP Code.
Branding the ads “seriously offensive” the regulator stated: “In view of the sexual nature of the images, which was explicit in some cases, and given that they bore no relevance to the product, we considered that their inclusion in the ads was likely to be seen as offensively objectifying women.”
It warned FIFA4Coins to ensure that its marketing did not contain imagery that was likely to cause serious or widespread offence and referred the matter to CAP’s Compliance team.

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