Advertising
Unacceptable features
Philip Kleinman
The Queen's double is up to her tricks again. Mrs Jeannette Charles, of Essex, whose resemblance to Her Majesty is striking, is the model in a current Italian press advertisement for whisky in which full advantage is taken of that resemblance. Well Mrs Charles couldn't do it here, Spectator April 27, 1974 not any more she couldn't. But she was doing it here as recently as January of this year.
In that month she was seen in an ad for Cygnet disposable plates seated in a throne-like chair and eating off one of the products in question. The agency which devised the ad, Moss Clark, denied any disrespect towards the Sovereign but did not deny that it was trying to use her, or more Precisely a picture which looked like her, to change people's attitudes to the social acceptability of Paper plates.
The agency and the publication Which ran the ad, the Morning Advertiser, did not at the time realise they were breaking any rules. They were swiftly disabused by a call from the Code of Advertising Practice Committee. The CAP Committee, which is a body representing the advertising industry itself, has no legal powers but its rulings are generally adhered to. Last year it tightened up the code, laying down that there is no justification for the visual or verbal portrayal of any public figure in an ad without his or her Permission.
The CAP edict was issued largely as the result of the row over the notorious ad for the Heathrow Hotel which appeared in the Times and featured unauthorised pictures of Edward Heath, David Frost and other notables. The new ruling went so far as to ban advertising impersonations even of foreigners and criminals. Watneys, for example, could not now reissue Its Red Revolution series of Posters featuring doubles of khrushchev, Castro and Mao Tse-tung without incurring the CAP Committee's wrath.
Well Cygnet ads stopped trying to suggest a Royal testimonial, and the case was given sufficient Prominence in the advertising trade press to make pretty sure that nobody is now in doubt about What CAP allows. It was not in Itself an incident of any importance but it serves to show the way the wind has been blowing in Adland.
Increasingly over the last year or two the ad industry has become aware that it must reinforce, and be seen to reinforce, its own voluntary system of control of advertising if it wishes to avoid the horrors of government regulation. Threats of state interference have not come only from the political left. It was Sir Geoffrey Howe, Minister for Trade and Consumer Affairs in the Conservative Government, who was talking just before Christmas of removing unacceptable features" from advertising and doing it by statute.
Admen in this country are well Informed about the activities of the Federal Trade Commission in the United States in forcing certain advertisers to run public Corrections of campaigns held to have been misleading. And the fact that France, too, recently introduced legislation making it Podsible for courts to order corrective advertising did not pass Unnoticed here.
In the new climate of con
sumerism, the Advertising Standards Authority, another voluntary body closely associated with the CAP Committee, decided last year to strengthen its control over agencies' behaviour by naming for the first time offenders against good taste and truthfulness. The latest batch of ASA adjudications included a rebuke, for instance, to the Offord Youlton agency for a Passport Whisky ad showing a man with his hand on a woman's knee and the heading, "It's not where you've been, it's where you are going."
And the Independent Television Contractors Association has been tightening up its rules about what ought and ought not to be seen in TV commercials. The ITCA copy committee, which vets all commercials before they go to the IBA for approval, now scrutinises alcohol advertising in particular much more carefully and has banned any shot showing older people encouraging youngsters to start drinking. Even the wellknown recent Courage beer commercial in which a father is seen taking his son to the pub for what he fondly believes to be the first time would not today be allowed to be screened.
The present defensive attitude is making the job of agency creative departments all the harder, as some of the brightest ideas for catching the consumer's eye are not totally beyond consumerist reproach. But the Advertising Association here has not gone as far as the equivalent body in Germany and advocated that advertisements should detail the product's disadvantages as well as its merits. Perhaps that is still to come.
Philip Kleinman, former editor of Adweek, writes weekly in The Spectator.
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