Banning funny ads like these is the work of MAD MEN!
That’s the verdict of top author FAY WELDON, who created some of our best-loved ad slogans and despairs at nannying new PC rules
ONCE upon a time, back in my Mad Men days, when I was head of copywriting for an advertising agency, my most successful advert was: ‘housewives! Now you can afford to pay for the central heating out of your monthly housekeeping.’
And I seem to remember the slogan ‘A woman’s life is in the home’ for a sewing machine. Ads were certainly sexist back then.
But this is 2019, not 1969. And the news that the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has forbidden anyone from screening two light-hearted and, yes, funny adverts under new rules to prevent ‘harmful’ gender stereotyping is an absurd overreaction.
By forbidding us from laughing at them, the ASA is making itself a laughing stock.
the two advertisements in question are for Philadelphia cheese and car maker Volkswagen. the Philadelphia ad is a cream-cheesy triumph depicting two new dads by a conveyor belt in a restaurant serving buffet food. One man is shown holding a child in his arms and the other is carrying his in a car seat.
As they talk, the first man absentmindedly places his child on the moving conveyor belt. ‘Let’s not tell Mum,’ he says, having moved across the room to pick up the baby.
Well, it made me laugh! All too true to life, I thought.
Meanwhile, the Volkswagen eGolf ad features the strapline: ‘When we learn to adapt, we can achieve anything.’
It shows a couple asleep in a tent, having climbed a steep rockface; two men in space; and a male athlete with a prosthetic running leg — before panning to a woman sitting quietly on a bench reading, next to a baby’s pram.
the advert was adapted from one shown successfully in France. And it actually rather moved me — it seemed so true and timeless, and I don’t see why what was deemed good enough for the French public should be deemed otherwise for us.
A tiny, tiny minority complained — out of all those who saw the ads, just three people wrote letters objecting to male-female stereotyping in the Volkswagen ad, and 128 in the Philadelphia ad.
And yet the ASA shrank back, cowering like a snail into its shell.
WHAT shock and horror! Men are being shown as traditionally male and women as traditionally female — duh! that’s the blooming joke.
But OMG, thinks the ASA, you never know, this might just swell into a social media storm and end up in dreaded controversy. So it backed down.
Jessica tye, investigations manager at the ASA, told the BBC that gender stereotypes in advertising could cause ‘real-world harms’.
‘Ads that specifically contrast male and female stereotypes need to be handled with care,’ she added.
But Jess, these are jokes against stereotyping, for heaven’s sake. And, much as we may respect the ASA and all its works, your organisation is not the morality police.
the new rules, which came into force in June, point out that ads
can’t include gender stereotypes that are ‘likely to cause harm, or serious or widespread offence’.
In these cases, I’m not sure that they did any of those things.
In fact, the ASA’s behaviour is just corporate virtue-signalling — ‘Look how good and socially conscious we are!’ how nannyish.
today’s advertising creatives have a better idea than the ASA of what is likely to cause offence; they understand the habits and fancies of us consumers down to the last nuance. It’s their job, after all! they know what entertains, what provokes and what sells.
the ASA crying ‘social justice’ comes over as far more patronising than most of the advertising companies — who pay for its existence — these days can either afford, or wish, to be.
the truth is that, on the whole, men are really great at looking after the baby. All real-world mothers know that. It’s just that they’re great at it — well — most of the time. they’re not going to warm up the bottle when the World Cup’s on, are they?
Real-world men keep getting distracted, in spite of their best intentions, and tend to believe that mothers are always being over-fussy. Which they can be, can’t they? that’s a joke, by the way — if we’re still allowed to make them.
But, joking aside, were the Oxo Mum and Milk tray Man really so dangerous? Would those hamlet ads — in which actor Gregor Fisher, with his gruesome scrape-over, finds solace in a cigar to the background tune of Bach’s Air On the G String — be banned for stereotyping male smokers?
It is an odd world when any commercial that shows a woman using a vacuum cleaner or washing the dishes — as in those very successful Eighties Fairy Liquid ads starring Nanette Newman — is seen as harmful, when, at the same time, it is considered acceptable for women to be shown having sex on mainstream TV such as Big Brother or Love Island.
the idea that an advert showing a woman cooking is going to turn us all back into housewives is condescending nonsense.
As I said, times have changed, and, these days, there’s usually a man in the background anyway, holding the baby or snatching the wooden spoon from the female hand on the grounds that he’s a better cook than she is.
In my marriage he is — and he also picks up my socks!
When, way back in my days as an advertising copywriter, I wrote the ‘Go to work on an egg’ campaign, thank heavens I didn’t have the ASA breathing down my neck, telling me I was culturally appropriating chickens.
I even wrote the ‘Ad an egg’ ads — which would probably catch the eye of the ASA police on health grounds: too much cholesterol.
We all want and hope to create a kinder, fairer, safer society. Except that the more rules we impose, the less we seem to be creating one — today, division and dissension run riot as busybodies in all walks of life issue edicts and bans and tell us how to behave.
So, please, at least leave us a few jokes, a few wry thoughts. the world around us gets greyer and greyer by the day.
We desperately need help, before the rule of the moral minority grinds us down completely.
As Shakespeare’s Sir toby Belch famously said to a reproving Malvolio, ‘dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’