An ad for a Call of Duty game has been banned for trivialising sexual violence.<\/p>\n
The Video on Demand and YouTube ad for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, seen in November, opened up with a scene at an airport security check, where a male officer said to a man: \u201cYou\u2019ve been randomly selected to be manhandled \u2013 face the wall.\u201d<\/p>\n
The male officer then told the man: \u201cI\u2019m gonna need you to remove your clothes, everything but the shoes,\u201d before a female officer put on a pair of gloves, and a final scene showed the male officer putting a hand-held metal detector in the man\u2019s mouth and said: \u201cBite down on this, she\u2019s going in dry.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received nine complaints that the ad was irresponsible and offensive for trivialising sexual violence.<\/p>\n
Activision Blizzard UK Ltd, trading as Call of Duty, said the ad promoted the 18-rated Black Ops 7 video game and was therefore targeted at adult audiences only, \u201cwho had a higher tolerance for irreverent or exaggerated humour\u201d.<\/p>\n
It said the ad had been approved by ad clearance agency Clearcast with an \u2018ex-kids\u2019 timing restriction and was not broadcast during or around children\u2019s programming or content likely to appeal to under-16s.<\/p>\n
The ASA said the ad depicted a non-consensual, invasive search of a man passing through airport security.<\/p>\n
It noted that the female officer was heard saying \u201cTime for the puppet show\u201d, which it considered would be understood as a reference to an intrusive body cavity search, and that the officer was treating the search as a source of entertainment.<\/p>\n
The ASA said: \u201cWe considered that most viewers would understand the ad was intended to be humorous because the conduct shown was exaggerated and at odds with a genuine airport security screening.\u201d<\/p>\n
But it added that \u201cwe noted that the humour in the ad was generated by the humiliation and implied threat of painful, non-consensual penetration of the man, an act associated with sexual violence\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn addition, we considered the officers\u2019 confident and joking demeanour presented this in a humorous manner.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause the ad alluded to non-consensual penetration, and framed it as an entertaining scenario, we considered that the ad trivialised sexual violence and was therefore irresponsible and offensive.\u201d<\/p>\n
The ASA ruled that the ad must not appear again in its current form, adding: \u201cWe told Activision Blizzard UK Ltd to ensure that their ads were socially responsible and did not cause serious offence, for example by trivialising sexual violence.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An ad for a Call of Duty game has been banned for trivialising sexual violence. The Video on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[195599,65622,195598,49,3253,48,195597,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-485100","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-activision-blizzard-uk-ltd","9":"tag-advertising-standards-authority","10":"tag-airport-security","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-call-of-duty","13":"tag-canada","14":"tag-sexual-violence","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}