I've just read an article on BBC news about the banning of a poster advertising a new computer game (Vietcong, Purple Haze). The poster apparently included the words "Napalm never smelt this good".
The words were not even used as a 'tag line', they were a quote from a magazine that had reviewed the game and was obviously a reference to apocalypse Now. Apparently, six people (yes, six!) complained about the advert, and the Advertising Standards Agency decided this was enough to have the advert banned. They are the same people who earlier this month banned the Tango advert (the one with the guy rolling down the hill in a rolled up carpet).
This country has a population of roughly 59.6 million people (National office of Statistics, 2003). Not all those people will have seen the video game poster - I saw it and I use the tube in London every day. If we assume that all the complaints against this advert came from within London and were from people who use the tube (for arguments sake) then these six people make up about 0.0002% of all the people who could have seen the advert in a day (3 million passenger journeys are made each day on the underground). Even if we up this number to 1%, then that still means that 99% of tube users found the advert inoffensive. This country may be a democracy, and we do support the views of the minority, but come on....Let's be realistic about this!
I have been trying to find some links to web sites showing banned adverts, but I can't find one...Yet.
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More like 3.1 million passenger journeys, actually... But they are JOURNEYS, one person could make more than one journey, in theory, on that day, those six people might have made about 500,000 trips each and be 100% of the tube users were offended.
I had a feeling "someone" would comment on this. Yes, they are "journeys". I couldn't be arsed going into detail or trying to find actual figures (as far as I'm aware, the underground is unable to come up with these kind of figures due to the crap computer system it has running there anyway).
Regardless of which, the people who complain about these adverts are arses! total twats!
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