Or not as the case may be.
An advert for beer company BrewDog has been banned over a “tongue-in-cheek” claim that its fruit-flavoured beers constitute “one of your five a day”.
An advertising email, dated 20 July, featured the subject heading “One of your five a day”, and advertised beers with names that included Lost In Guava, Pineapple Punch, and Lost In Lychee & Lime.
No reasonable person would take this as anything other than a light hearted piss take. In years gone by, people would have smiled at the humour and moved on, whether they bought the product or not. Remember “there’s a terrific draught in here”? A blatant pun. Or the beer that “worked wonders”? I don’t recall anyone complaining about the lack of wonders or there not being a real draft…
A recipient complained that the five-a-day claim was misleading.
And that is where we are. It is no more misleading than expecting a soft beverage to give you real wings. Some cretin with a sense of humour failure is all it takes to get the relevant authorities involved. Said authorities should have told this person to get a grip and piss off, but no, they are indulged, which leads to enabling more of the same. Meanwhile we lose our sense of humour along the way.
BrewDog, which is based in Ellon, Scotland, acknowledged that the advertised beers did not count towards a consumer’s five a day. However, it said it believed recipients would generally understand that alcoholic beverageswere not equivalent to portions of fruit or vegetables.
You would think so…
The firm said the email was only sent to existing customers, who were likely to be aware of BrewDog’s “playful” marketing style, and therefore felt that recipients were even more likely to recognise “one of your five a day” as a “tongue-in-cheek remark”.
Clearly some of your customers are kidults who never grew up and have no capacity for rational thinking or humour.
Upholding the complaint, the Advertising Standards Authority noted that government guidelines recommend people eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. “The ASA acknowledged that the subject heading ‘one of your five a day’ might be interpreted by some consumers as a humorous nod to the fruit-flavoured beers featured in the body of the email.
“However, because the claim referred to well-known government advice on health and wellbeing, we considered that, in general, consumers would not expect advertisers to include such claims unless the advertised product was recognised as meeting the requirements of that advice.”
Once again, the ASA demonstrates that it is entirely unfit for purpose. Disband it and hang them all.
“We therefore considered consumers were likely to interpret the claim ‘one of your five a day’ to mean that the fruit-flavoured beers in the ad’s body copy counted towards the recommended five daily portions of fruit and vegetables,” the ASA said.
“Because alcoholic drinks did not count towards a person’s ‘five a day’, we concluded that the claim was misleading.”
Only if you are a complete and utter cretin with no ability to interpret blatant humour.
Yeah, hang the bastards and put their heads on spikes outside traitors’ gate.
Maybe I need to lodge a complaint about claims that electric cars have zero emissions. I can already see the weaselly worded response that, because EVs don’t produce exhaust gases that the claim is basically true.
No more true than the five a day bollocks.
Maybe they should send the adverts out again with “NOT” in handwriting font in front of “One of your five a day”.
and with the comment ‘because some of you you are really thick and you need to be told’
I remember the ending of the last episode of a series of The Two Fat Ladies when Clarissa, always the passenger, expressed a desire to take over the controls of the sidecar combination they always went about on. The camera viewed them from behind as they changed places while motoring down a lane and it was very amusing with the stars talking all the time. It was obviously done by professional stuntmen/women but people had to complain how irresponsible it was for the two ladies to have done such a thing.
There must always be killjoys.
When I see the word “guideline” I reach for my revolver.
There’s an interesting symmetry here. The “Advertising Standards Authority”, depsite its name, has no official status. It’s an industry body, not a governmental one. And the “five a day” slogan was concocted by the advertising industry for Californian fruit growers. It has no basis in medicine (other than the general principle that eating fruit and veg. is good for you).
So, although this looks like Brewdog being collared by the law for making misleading medical statements, it’s actually the advertising business protecting intellectual property.
I suspect Brewdog reported themselves for the extra publicity. If only their beer was as good as their marketing dept.
And canines constitute no part of their beverage either.
Nor is the head brewer a dog. Oh, and there are no heads in the mash. Human or canine.
Dear Mr Longrider
I remember a similar ‘problem’ with Hedgehog Flavoured Crisps, none of which contained hedgehog. The Office of Fair Trading stipulated a name change to Hedgehog Flavour Crisps, which means much the same thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog_Flavour_Crisps
Whenever the ASA or other busybodies pronounce upon something they should specify the number of complaints. It probably only takes one, as was apparently the case of the BBC local radio disc jockey who was sacked for playing the “wrong” version of The Sun has got his hat on.
These bodies only exist to give latter-day ARP Warden Hodges something to do.
DP