Advertising
Banning the sex well
Philip Kleinman
An innocuous advertisement in one of the colour supplements. A shapely young couple on a beach. He is topping up her glass with tonic water. A bottle of Bacardi rum stands between them. Nothing untoward is taking place, but the posture of the models and the softness of the photography lend the add an unmistakably erotic character.
Innocuous did I say? Let's see now. Couldn't that picture constitute an infringement of rule 2.10 of the new code on alcohol advertising promulgated by the Advertising Standards Authority a few weeks ago? The rule says: "Advertisements should neither claim or suggest that any drink can contribute towards sexual success."
Already the ASA has rapped two Courvoisier "brandy of Napoleon" ad § for contravening the rule, even though they were produced before the new code appeared. They are ones in which a Napoleonic officer is seen creeping into a lady's bedroom and undressing her. Of course the Courvoiseur campaign doesn't say in so many words that if you drink that pricy French stuff all barriers to joyous fornication will fall. But you can't deny that there is a suggestion that it might help.
Well, for my money the Bacardi ad is no less suggestive, in fact rather more so, since the picture shows the drink actually being used to further a male-female relationship, whereas in the Courvoisier ads the brandy is just part of the furniture. Furthermore, while both rely on a fantasy setting for their effect, Bacardi gets a lot closer to the real fantasy life of its readers — if one may use such an apparent contradiction in terms — than does Courvoisier, whose jokey approach.
is unlikely to burrow very deep into anyone's mind.
Unarguably, however, the Bacardi ad, like the other similar ads in the campaign, is less overtly sexual than Courvoisier's, however powerful the overtones may be. So I guess that if anyone were to lodge a complaint against it—and ,don't for one moment think that I wish to — the ASA would clear it. Which only shows how difficult it is to apply such a code once you try to regulate not what words and pictures may say but what they may suggest.
Yet it is as much by what they suggest as by what they say that most advertising campaigns work, and it is possible to maintain — some people do maintain — that the . falsity of the images they build is far more important than the occasional falsity of the factual claims they make. To take only (only!) the matter of sex, a whole array of products — cosmetics, perfumes, toiletries, clothes — rely on the suggestion that erotic happiness can be guaranteed by material purchases.
„ These products are not, of course, the object of such suspicion ' as alcohol, which is after al La poison. And the new code does not only ban sex. Drink ads are not to be aimed at young people, associate drink with driving nor impute any failing to those who do not drink. Nor should they give the impression "that drinking is necessary for social success or acceptanee."
Hold on a minute. I see. even graver difficulties of interpretation arising out of that last bit.
Indeed if you took the phrase in its widest sense it could put paid to a large number of campaigns, of which Martini's "right one" is only the most obvious.
But Peter Thomson, director of the ASA, has said that he doesn't think many advertisers are likely to be affected by the new code. So I take it that he and his colleagues will not attempt to probe too deeply into the suggestions and the impressions contained within ads, provided they are wrapped in just a little subtlety. As long, that is, as the Bacardi man keeps a top hat off his head and his hands out of his girl friend's shorts, he won't be called to account for being quite certainly both A snob and a seducer.
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