Omo comes out clean in ad probe
Viewers complained that washing powder commercials sent wrong messages
OMO is under fire for its washing-powder adverts, “Have a crush stain” and “Ooh eh eh”.
Pule Kotu-Rammopo of Johannesburg was so offended by “Have a crush stain” that he complained to the Advertising Standards Authority.
The television advert begins with a little boy arriving home from school with a stain on his shirt. When his mother asks, “What’s that stain?” he responds, “Have a crush, mom.”
The boy is later shown eating a hamburger and, apparently infatuated with a little girl walking past, he loses concentration and sauce spills from the burger — explaining the recurring stains on his shirt.
Kotu-Rammopo found the advert far from innocent, claiming it “hints of sexual inappropriateness”.
“Children flirting and squirting ‘sauces’ on themselves is in bad taste, as those innuendoes are often used for ‘adult’ adverts,” Kotu-Rammopo told the advertising watchdog.
Last week the Sunday Times published a letter by a reader who was upset by Omo’s radio and television advert featuring a black woman slapping a white woman.
Robyn Taylor wrote of Unilever, which makes Omo: “[It] is clearly of the view that black women handle opposition with aggression, but, worse still, its warped attempt at humour sends out a message to children that this is acceptable behaviour.”
A spokeswoman for Unilever, Unathi Mgobozi, defended the advert, saying it had won an award in the “truly South African category” at the 2012 Pendoring awards. She told the
Its warped attempt at humour sends out a message to children that this is acceptable behaviour
Sunday Times that Omo’s adverts were intended to be “tongue in cheek”, “light-hearted and amusing”.
Last month a television viewer, in a complaint to the online customer service website HelloPeter, said she would never buy Omo again because the two adverts featured black people. The only white person in the adverts, she claimed, was being slapped by a black woman. “Slapping a white woman on her hand is a no-go,” she wrote.
In response, Mgobozi said: “Our advertisements are not intended to lean towards a particular racial group.”
She added: “We employed the tactic of humour, almost like a Madam and Eve cartoon . . . We have received positive feedback from our consumers requesting us to put our adverts back on air, and the Omo slap advert in particular.”
In its response to Kotu-Rammopo’s complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority, Unilever said it was common for boys and girls aged 10 to have crushes. “These crushes are not sexual in nature and are essentially innocent. The hypothetical reasonable person would not interpret the commercial in that way,” it said.
The authority agreed and dismissed the complaint.
“The scene is not portrayed in a sexualised, perverted or deviant manner . . . It is highly unlikely that any reasonable person viewing the commercial would interpret it as being sexually inappropriate or even that there is a sexual innuendo present,” it said.