14th May 2003

Sad people who complain about ads?

THE woman I share my bed with is not happy. (Now there you go again - jumping to conclusions). No, the reason she is not happy is that she thinks that advertising companies are trying to corrupt our kids.

And you know what - I think she has a point.

The ads that are annoying her at the moment are the ones for HB Ice Cream.

One shows a little girl screaming all the way home from school just to make her throat sore in order to fool her mother into giving her ice cream.

The other one shows a boy breaking his toy to gain sympathy from his mum. This results in - you guessed it - him getting ice cream.

(My experience of mothers is that they are not so gullible, but anyway.)

My beloved thinks that these ads are teaching our children that they can get what they want by deceit. And it’s hard to see what else they are trying to do.

Then McDonalds came along with another ad showing two little boys messing up every plate in the house in order to get their father to bring them to McDs.

This was the final straw. My lover is now talking about complaining.

The ASAI are the people you want, said I and I went about tracking them down.

Which isn’t hard. They are on the net at www.asai.ie and the site is an absolute howl.

They have lists of all the recent complaints. It allows the common person to have a laugh at those sad people who have nothing better to do than complain about ads.

Like the person who complained about the Baileys ad, saying that it encouraged homophobia. What are they like?

Or the person who objected to the line:‘Actual size (we lied, it’s a man thing)’ in a Walkers crisps ad as being offensive to men in that it promoted the idea that men lie. You don’t say!

Or the humourless git who didn’t like the woman with a hairy chest in the Tennants ad.

The ASAI’s slogan is ‘Fiant Secundum Descriptionem Bona’.

Bona? Nudge! Nudge! Wink! Wink! Phenaar! Phenaar!

Actually, it means ‘let the product fit the description’ and the ASAI are the sworn enemies of such childish, double-meaning interpretations.

And when they don’t like an ad, that’s the end of it.

Defending the public or moral police? A bit of both I’d say but they don’t accept every complaint.

Meanwhile, me and my significant other have a bit of sadness coming on.


Join the Vexacious Complaints Campaign

If Heineiken were so good at running a night club, including fixing the lads up with georgeous women, how come the poor chaps leave on their own?

This is the type of thing that has got to stop - illogical ads.

So let me know which ads you think don’t ad(d) up, send them to me at newsbase@eircom.net and I’ll publish them.

PS: I know it was a Carlsberg ad - I just wanted to annoy their marketing people.