September 21, 2005

Sin City adverts banned by one

Sin_City_Poster.jpgI hate the over political correctness our world is coming to, sorry strike, has come to. It's futile, pampering, nannyish, pathetic and quite frankly some people just need a slap in the face with a wet fish.

With that balanced viewpoint in mind, let me make tell you what's happened to ban some very cool interactive adverts in England (I shall make that distinction) by the Advertising Standards Authority (subtitle: we're too scared someone might sue us for anything. tagline: cave in at first mention of trouble).

The adverts for Sin Cityare billboard posters with screens, where you can press a button and see some clips from the movie play. How cool is that? Superb idea. Beforehand it was ensured that the buttons were too high for kids to press, that the rated 18 was over the poster and they edited the clips down to ensure nothing would upset anyone.

However, in this idiotic state, everything offends someone. Someone somewhere will complain about a blank poster for something. Maybe it's racist to white people to have a blank piece of paper, who knows. Well some ONE did complain about this poster and said it might be offensive to children. Yeah, so is the news on television, are you complaining about that, is someone banning that?

Mind you they may have had a point, I could see hundreds of kids racing out afterwards killing grannies, rolling cars, and eating the innards of people after watching clips of the movie. From Digital Spy:

...a person who had seen it complained to the Advertising Standards Authority that the poster was distressing and unsuitable for children, reports BBC News.

Buena Vista argued that children were unlikely to be affected by the material since the buttons pressed to activate the clips were generally out of their reach, and that there had only been one complaint throughout the 47-day campaign during which there had been 486,570 interactions.

Since children were still able to see the material once somebody had pressed the button, the ASA ordered that posters be withdrawn

That's 2.0552027457508683231600797418665e-4 percent (if my calculations are right)! So there'll be no videos appearing on mobile devices that aren't universally rated then? After all, anyone could see them. Better ban mobile phones...and the news....and TV...RANT RANT RANT!


Posted by at September 21, 2005 02:57 PM


Comments

Yeah, I saw one of these posters at a bus-station near where I live and thought it was a cool idea (I thought it may have been prone to vandalism, but weeks later it was still functional)

As far as I remember, the clips on the screen were the same as the TV trailers. Meaning that the kids are just as likely to see that stuff at home. It doesn't make sense.

Recently I noticed that it had been replaced by a Herbie: Full Loaded poster that worked in the same way. I guess that's the ASA in action.

Posted by: Dom Dunc at September 22, 2005 01:49 PM