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Travel advert is second most complained about of all time
Booking.com’s recent controversial TV and cinema advert was the second most complained about advert of all time, according to latest figures from the Advertising Standards Authority.
Only Paddy Power’s advert offering incentives to customers to bet on the outcome of the Oscar Pistorius murder trial attracted more complaints in 2014.
In total last year, 5,525 complained about the Paddy Power advert, which the ASA ruled caused serious offence by trivializing the issues surrounding a murder trial and ordered its immediate removal.
However, the ASA did not uphold the 1,768 complaints about booking.com’s ad, which viewers claimed was offensive and encouraged children to swear because it used ‘booking’ instead of a swear word. The ad has been allowed to continue and, as a result, complaints have now topped 2,000.
The ASA said: "We did not uphold the complaints, judging that it was a light hearted play on words that couldn’t be mistaken for an actual swear word.
"We also ruled that it was unlikely to encourage swearing amongst children; any children that did pick up on the joke were unlikely to have learned bad language through the ad itself."
The ASA said the top three most complained about adverts last year (the third was a competition from The Sun offering a date with a Page 3 model) , were also the most complained about adverts ever.
It said this reflected the rise of social media, which has allowed members of the public to voice and co-ordinate their concerns about ads.
Many of the complaints about the Paddy Power ad and The Sun’s ‘Win a Date with a Page 3 Model’ were coordinated via the online petition site, change.org.
A big theme of 2014 was the rise of copycat websites, which mislead people by appearing to be official government websites. The tenth most complained about ad last year concerned passport-uk.co.uk , which offers passport renewal services for a fee and allegedly implied it was a government site.
The ASA said it had taken ‘firm action’ to reduce the number of misleading ads in this area.
Linsey McNeill
Editor Linsey McNeill has been writing about travel for more than three decades. Bylines include The Times, Telegraph, Observer, Guardian and Which? plus the South China Morning Post. She also shares insider tips on thetraveljournalist.co.uk
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