Benefits of a ban
In the second extract from eGR's forthcoming advertising feature, the former VP Marketing for AdsDotCom discusses the benefits of being banned by the ASA.
When the legislation allowing you to advertise on TV came through, our concern was that we were not going to have the budget of everyone else or the brand recognition in the mass media. So the first part of our brief to our agency was to do something that really stands us out of the crowd. The second was “don’t destroy our brand”.
We had a brand for honesty, integrity, reliability. So they came up with a dwarf campaign.
We first went out with three commercials, which got approved by Clearcast and ran for about five months to the end of their life cycle. Then the ASA banned them, originally because they stated dwarfs look like kids and therefore under 25 years old, which was against the rules.
It was the first time an ASA ruling has been overturned, as we were going to go to the High Court under the disability discrimination act. 70% of dwarfs in the UK have equity cards. It is one of the main areas of employment they have. So we got quite involved in the lobbying for dwarfs.
We were perfectly prepared to go on Sky TV with our actors and complain, and nearly did that. In the end, the ASA said they would ban the ads on different grounds, but guaranteed we could carry on using dwarfs.
The campaigns were very successful. They increased revenue by around 35% over the period we could attribute to TV, with about 70% of this coming from reactivation and increased retention and the remainder from new acquisitions.
Getting banned was incredibly helpful. If the ASA bans ads for a stupid reason, then you are guaranteed to have good publicity. Paddy Power has worked on that their entire lives.
The important thing is to make sure that one, you do keep to the rules, and two, you don’t do anything that damages your reputational integrity.”