When the billboard went up throughout London, its creators at company BBH knew it might provoke a robust response. The daring line learn, “Most cancers received’t be the very last thing that f*cks me,” throughout a close-up picture of a girl’s bare torso.
The advert was a part of a marketing campaign from nonprofit GirlvsCancer addressing stigma surrounding most cancers and feminine sexuality. Inside three months of its launch, the U.Ok.’s Promoting Requirements Authority (ASA) banned the advert, deeming it “more likely to trigger critical and widespread offense.”
The ASA’s ruling could not have come as a complete shock after the marketing campaign stirred debate on social media. However Helen Rhodes, government artistic director of BBH London, countered: “We by no means got down to trigger offense. This was for the group.”
“Apparently, lots of the adverse feedback had been from males, who weren’t the main target of the marketing campaign. The ladies who confronted these points discovered it extremely empowering,” Rhodes advised ADWEEK. “It appears that evidently girls’s points in promoting are nonetheless a taboo. There are lots of double requirements right here.”
Rhodes’ remark echoes an statement made about one other advert that was banned across the identical time as GirlvsCancer’s marketing campaign. This one was from Calvin Klein, that includes singer-songwriter FKA Twigs in a black and white picture with a shirt draped round her nude physique. The ASA dominated that it depicted her as a “stereotypical sexual object”—one more Calvin Klein advert portraying a partly unclothed Jeremy Allen White was not banned.
FKA Twigs argued that she really discovered Calvin Klein’s picture of her empowering. “In mild of reviewing different campaigns previous and present of this nature, I can’t assist however really feel there are some double requirements right here,” she wrote on Instagram.
