Outdoor company rejects dog sex innuendo ad
Creative work for a billboard that makes reference to a scandal in which a drunken rugby player was involved in an apparent sexual act with a dog has been rejected by Ooh Media, the outdoor advertising company.
The banned Betstar ad
The poster for Betstar.com.au, which reads “Raiders to do dogs again?”, refers to a photo of Canberra Raiders rugby league player Joel Monaghan in an uncompromising position with a canine. The photo was posted on Twitter in November last year. The player subsequently left the club.
According to Ooh Media’s CEO Brendon Cook, the Betstar ad, which was created inhouse, is the sixth piece of creative work the company has had to knock back this year. The moves comes as pressure on the outdoor industry over public taste mounts with a parliamentary inquiry into the regulation of billboards under way.
“There’s a perception that anything can go up on a billboard. That’s not true,” said Cook. “This is an example of where creative work could have caused problems if our team, which is based in Melbourne, was not made aware of the context of the story.”
“But we have a process in place, and a panel of 25 people of different ages and sex that reviews creative work before it goes up,” he said.
“We’re working hard to stay in tune with community standards and the rules of the Advertising Standards Bureau. In the main we’re doing a good job. But we have 5,000 bits of creative work that go through the company every year. It’s not easy and mistakes are made, but there’s no such thing as a perfect system.”
The most troublesome advertisers for outdoor media companies of late are religious groups promoting their websites with provocative slogans, Cook added.
Well I thought it was funny…
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Booo.
That’s about as funny a one-off as you’re gonna get.
Yoda says: Nanny state becoming are we.
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For those who’ve forgotten what it’s like to be treated like an adult:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFmisvYPOEA&sns=fb
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Not a bad PR stunt, are ooh! moving into social media?
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Gold.
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I’m glad we have outdoor advertising companies keeping us in tune with community standards.
When will these people making these ads learn that nobody likes your witty use of words and topics. We’d much prefer wholesome outdoor like a picture of a girl drinking with a headline of something like ‘I bet she likes a cockatoo’.
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Regardless of its merits, do clients actually pay for this stuff? It’s so painfully obvious and simply not clever; most blokes in a pub could come up with that after a couple of beers!
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@ WK If most blokes in the pub will come up with it then it’s bang on I guess.
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@ Herald Sun You’re right! And all these years these wanky ad agencies trying to be clever when utter mediocrity was the answer the whole time!!!!
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I wouldn’t call a headline taking the piss out of meatheads with a penchant for bestiality mediocre.
But that’s just me. What else should they do in a few words on a billboard to get people thinking about betting on that game?
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Well that sucks. I guess it is just too much for people to swallow.
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Excellent. Get over it !
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Seriously, every time I see something like this it makes me want to throw down my toys and refuse to play anymore. It may not be hilarious, it may not even be funny, but WHY ban it?
When is Australia finally going to leave the 1950s?
More amazing is that almost all the submissions to the parliamentary inquiry on outdoor advertising (http://www.aph.gov.au/house/co.....g/subs.htm) from the advertising industry advocate pulling your pants down and bending over for Nanny’s rod – “we are so naughty, we really mean to be good”. What tosh. Read the submissions from the ‘concerned citizens’ you’re being cowed by. These are from Mavis and her Officiously Official Outrage brigade. They are not representative of the mainstream.
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The ad was actually created by Sputnik Agency working closely with Betstar to promote exactly what many comments have picked up on – the fact that if you are a couple of blokes in the pub who like to make cheap jokes about the game they love, then Betstar are the ideal place to have a punt as apposed to one of the larger faceless online betting sites. If you don’t know the full context of the joke it’s a perfectly innocent line, so not offensive to anyone. If you do, then it works. You have a slight smile. Job done
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