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Britain's easy to offend Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) recently deemed Ryanair's flight-attendants-in-their-underwear campaign too offensive for public consumption.
The ASA pulled the plug on the newspaper ad, which featured Ryanair staffers posing under the headline "RED HOT FARES & CREW," after receiving 17 complaints that it was offensive and objectified women.
While the ads seemed mild to us (even the feminist blog Jezebel noted, "meh, I've seen worse"), it's hardly a surprise that the ban-happy ASA axed the campaign.
The ASA is a self-regulatory watchdog that oversees advertising in the Britain. While it looks into 10 to 15 questionable ads a week, it takes only one public complaint for the ASA to ax an ad... and it has taken full advantage of that power.
The ban-happy ASA has pulled the trigger on everything from ads spouting misinformation to ads featuring excessive cleavage to over-Photoshopped advertorials.
While some praise it for being an equal opportunity censor (it has dropped the hammer on Israeli tourism ads that pretend Palestinian territories don't exist and Palestinian tourism ads that pretend Israel doesn't exist), others complain there's neither rhyme nor reason to its rationale. An ad featuring an underweight model for the Drop Dead fashion website was banned, but an ad for H&M featuring a similarly emaciated model avoided censure.
The ASA noted that "Although we acknowledged that the women in the ads had consented to appear in the calendar, we considered that the ads were likely to cause widespread offense, when displayed in a national newspaper, and therefore concluded that they breached the [advertising] code."
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(This was the calendar that accompanied the newspaper ad campaign.)
This online ad for clothing line Drop Dead was banned in November 2011 after the ASA received one complaint regarding its underweight model. ASA called Drop Dead "socially irresponsible" for portraying the image in which featured the "hollows in her thighs" and highly visible ribs and collar bones.
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This ad for Lynx (the British equivalent of Axe) was banned in November for being "sexually suggestive, indecent, provocative."
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See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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