Censorship by any other name

Thursday March 24, 2011

Patrick Hayes argues that the Advertising Standards Authority is an insult to good sense and should be scrapped

The idea of replacing the morning coffee with a glass of Beaujolais for breakfast is something even Mad Men’s Don Draper would baulk at, let alone those working in high pressure City jobs in 21st century London. At a time when the liquid lunches of even the most hardened hacks on Fleet Street are but a distant memory, who could possibly fail to see the funny side of the claims in this advert?

‘Forget boring team meetings in the office. Book a Beaujolais breakfast with Corney & Barrow … and enjoy a glass of Beaujolais Nouveau with a full English breakfast for £10. We guarantee your meeting minutes will be taken to a whole new level!’

The answer is that, of the thousands of people in the City of London who received it by email, only one was bothered by it. One single, humourless, person. Rather than complain to the company, or simply delete the email, this individual instead decided that because he thought it was ‘irresponsible’, the ad shouldn’t be seen by anyone. So a complaint by this humourless person was lodged to the equally humourless Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) which last week censured the company and ruled ‘the advertisement must not appear again in its current form’.

Here we have a classic case of the ‘tyranny of the minority’ that exists in the UK today. Only one person needs to find an advert offensive for the whole population to be prevented from seeing it. If anyone who is particularly sensitive to an issue – or who simply lacks a sense of humour – complains about an ad, then the ASA can demand that it is withdrawn.

Why on earth should a handful of unelected suits in a room decide on behalf of companies what messages they can advertise and what adverts the public can or cannot see? Some argue we need a body to protect us from misleading claims. But most businesses know it’s not in their long-term interests to make false claims, as – although evidently the ASA thinks otherwise – people are actually rational, intelligent beings and suss out scams pretty quickly.

But, as the ASA itself admits, less than half of the complaints it deals with are about misleading claims. The rest are complaints about the ‘offensive’, ‘irresponsible’ or ‘harmful’ nature of the content broadcast. Take for example, their adjudication on the Corney & Barrow advert. Their reason for banning it was, ‘we considered that the advertisement encouraged consumers to adopt styles of drinking that were unwise. We concluded that the advertisement was socially irresponsible.’

The language used is telling. Evidently this clique of fifteen unelected men and women who form the ASA’s decision-making council see themselves as philosopher kings passing sage judgements on behalf of the public about what they deem to be ‘unwise’ and ‘socially irresponsible’.

For the ASA it seems to be a case of ‘monkey see, monkey do’. Any images the public are shown, the public will immediately imitate, the mindless, gullible drones that we are. The ASA probably wouldn’t hesitate in banning an advert encouraging us to jump off cliffs, because obviously once exposed to it, we’d all collectively turn into lemmings.

Nowhere is the ASA more puritanical than when laying down rules and passing judgement on alcohol advertising. According to its codes, advertisers are banned from ‘claiming or implying’ that alcohol can enhance confidence or popularity. Linking the idea of drinking alcohol with ‘seduction, sexual activity or sexual success’ is out of the question. And you also can’t suggest that alcohol could be ‘a key component of the success of a personal relationship or social event’.

So-called ‘excessive’ drinking mustn’t be encouraged and ‘marketing communications must neither show, imply, encourage or refer to aggression or unruly, irresponsible or anti-social behaviour, nor link alcohol with brave, tough or daring people or behaviour’. It really becomes hard to see how advertisers can portray alcohol in the context it’s normally consumed – when people are having fun – at all.

And the list goes on. Alcohol cannot be portrayed as ‘capable of changing mood, physical condition or behaviour or as a source of nourishment’. People featured in the ads must look 25 or over, must not be shown drinking in a work environment, and must not be ‘shown behaving in an adolescent or juvenile manner’. And these are just the rules that apply to alcohol in particular. Broader guidelines cover all advertising: nothing that causes ‘widespread or serious offence’ is permitted.

Advertising is a free speech issue too. The ASA’s restrictions are deeply censorious in the way they control our public space and seek to protect us from ‘offensive’ or ‘irresponsible’ imagery. The restrictions imposed upon adverts by the faux governmental body of the ASA are both deeply patronising to the public and anathema to the idea of a free society. The sooner that we rule that the ASA ‘must not appear again in its current (or any) form’, and call upon advertisers to cast off the shackles of this unelected, insidious institution, the better.

Patrick Hayes works at the Institute of Idea and is a reporter for the online magazine spiked