This week's decision about Avonmore soup ads shows how hard it is not to offend the public, writes Hugh Linehan.
'Advertising is legalised lying." So said HG Wells, and who are we to disagree? No matter how much the ad industry may protest that it's only in the business of providing us with information we can use to make informed decisions about our purchases, we all know they're a bunch of snake-oil salesmen who'll do anything to part us from our hard-earned euro.
What an irony, then, that the ad industry's freedom of expression is probably more curtailed than anyone else's. Advertisers are hemmed in by regulations on taste, accuracy and objectivity which would cause most journalists to throw up their hands in horror.
Take, for example, the ad for Avonmore soup which had a complaint upheld against it by the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland (ASAI) this week. In the ad, two children watch the woman next door, who is the mother of one of the children, sweating over heavy-duty powertools to make a bowl of home-made soup. In contrast, the other mother simply reaches for a carton of creamy, delicious Avonmore and serves it with a smile.
The ASAI rejected a complaint that the ad was suggesting the woman was "so stupid that she thought she needed a sledgehammer to make soup", but it upheld complaints that it implied, to children in particular, "that making food at home was extremely hard work and not at all worth the effort when it could be bought in a packet, and that it was a dangerous message to tell children that making meals using fresh food was a difficult, dangerous and mindless exercise".
Now, there's nothing to stop me expressing the opinion in these pages that Avonmore Fresh Soup is vile, flavourless gloop which resembles the stuff you see spattered across the streets of our cities every Saturday night. That's my sincerely held view and I'm entitled to voice it. Advertisers must operate by different rules - and rightly so, many people will feel.
As it so happens, the great majority of complaints upheld by the ASAI deal with misleading information about prices or conditions attached to certain products (including one this week against this newspaper for two readers' travel offers that quoted prices exclusive of taxes and charges).
But one can't help wondering whether the regulatory authorities are underestimating the intelligence of the average Irish consumer. In other ASAI decisions this week, an entertainment promoter was censured for describing Dublin's cavernous Point Theatre as "intimate", while the Northern Ireland Tourism Board had a complaint upheld against it for an ad which suggested the Republic's airports were overcrowded, delay-ridden hellholes. And the distributors of the haunted-house movie remake The Amityville Horror were rapped on the knuckles for claiming it was "based on a true story". Well, duh.
THE ASAI IS an independent self-regulatory body set up and financed by the advertising industry. Its stated objective is to "ensure that all commercial advertisements and promotions are legal, decent, honest and truthful". According to its chief executive, Frank Goodman, the complaints committee, composed of representatives of the advertising industry and other interested parties, had little difficulty in coming to most of its recent decisions. "The allegations about the airports were so general, and so wide, that it was easy to come to a decision. The Avonmore one was more difficult. Obviously, there was a huge amount of humour involved. We accepted that Avonmore was a quality product, but we had specific concerns relating to children."
According to Goodman, the EU Commission is currently looking at the whole issue of advertising targeted at children. "Advertisers in the EU have been told that they have 12 months to show that self-regulation works."
And there's the rub. The ASAI, and the advertising industry generally, operates in an environment which is in a constant state of flux, with public attitudes changing on a range of issues from gender stereotyping to teen drinking. With these changes come new political pressures, and advertisers need to keep on their toes if they're to hold on to the self-regulation they value so highly. As it is, they operate alongside a range of other State regulatory bodies, such as the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI), whose rules overlap with but don't exactly parallel their own.
One of the thorniest questions with which the authority must grapple is that of bad taste or offensiveness. Last year it upheld a complaint against that irritating Guinness ad with the two guys drinking on what turns out to be the bar of the Titanic, because complainants considered the use of the sinking of the Titanic as a setting for an advertisement offensive. A number of the complainants felt the commercial was in bad taste and insensitive when it was reasonable to assume that the viewing audience included some people who are children or grandchildren of people who lost their lives in the Titanic tragedy.
One might suggest there's a sense of humour bypass at work here, but that implies that there was something funny in the first place about the ad for Guinness, a company which in recent years has often found itself criticised over its ads. Only this week it emerged that Clare county coroner Isobel O'Dea had criticised another Guinness spot, in which a young man jumps off the Cliffs of Moher and swims to New York.
"I would be concerned that the advert could be upsetting to families that have been bereaved at the Cliffs of Moher," said the coroner.
THAT PARTICULAR AD had been the subject of numerous complaints to the ASAI, which rejected them, as "it did not consider that the advertisement either condoned or encouraged dangerous behaviour or suicide. Nevertheless, it was concerned that it appeared to have given rise to offence."
The ASAI is about to embark on a review of its code on advertising, with the marketing of food and drink, particularly to children, at the top of its list. With new regulations already in place from the BCI on targeting children, it looks as if the admen's jobs will be getting harder in years to come.