September 10, 2019
In my new Canadian Lawyer column, I take a look at two recent U.K. ASA advertising decisions with potential implications for Canada. Below is an excerpt with a link to my column.
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In an interesting development, two ads were recently banned under new gender stereotyping in advertising rules recently implemented by the U.K. Advertising Standards Authority. The ASA, the U.K.’s member-based independent advertising regulator, introduced its new gender stereotyping advertising rules in June after consultations with industry and a report entitled Depictions, Perceptions and Harm. The ASA’s new rule, which applies to all broadcast and non-broadcast media, including online claims and social media, prohibits gender stereotypes in advertising “that are likely to cause harm, or serious or widespread offence.”
The first ad banned by the ASA, for Volkswagen’s eGolf electric car, portrayed man closing a flap on a tent perched on a steep cliff face while a female climber sleeps, two male astronauts floating in a space capsule and a male Paralympic track-and-field athlete long-jumping with the accompanying slogan “When we learn to adapt, we can achieve anything.” The ad closed with an eGolf car gliding silently by a woman with a stroller, sitting on a park bench.
In the second ad, for Mondelēz International’s Philadelphia Cream Cheese, two new fathers are portrayed taking their children to a restaurant, with dishes on a conveyor belt. Both are distracted by cream cheese dishes and accidentally lose them on the belt. The clip closes with the line: “let’s not tell mum.”
According to the ASA’s ruling, the first ad depicted “a man being adventurous juxtaposed with a woman being delicate or dainty [and was] unlikely to be acceptable.” The ASA also “concluded that the ad presented gender stereotypes in a way that was likely to cause harm and therefore breached the Code.” Volkswagen Group UK responded that its ad was intended to depict adapting to challenges and did not think that a climber, astronaut or Paralympic athlete were gender-stereotypical.
The ASA’s view in its second ruling, is that the cream cheese ad “relied on the stereotype that men were unable to care for children as well as women.” Mondelēz UK’s response was that it has deliberately chosen two new fathers to avoid the stereotype of two new mothers with healthcare responsibilities and that it merely meant to show fathers distracted by its cream cheese.
Both of the ASA’s decisions read slightly like graduate school sociology papers. In its cream cheese decision, for example, while the ASA claimed to recognize the concept of humor (“we acknowledged the action was intended to be light-hearted and comical”), it sternly cautioned that it “did not consider that the use of humor in the ad mitigated the effect of the harmful stereotype … [that] was central to it, because the humor derived from the audiences’ familiarity with the gender stereotype being portrayed.”
Babies going in circles on a conveyor belt with fathers distracted by cream cheese, harmful? Obviously.
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For my full column, see: Should Advertising Regulators Enforce Wokeness?
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