Advertising must not be censored by PC zealots

The recent banning by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) of two advertisements under its new rules against “gender stereotyping” marks a further encroachment upon freedom of communication. In this instance it also involves intervention in the operation of the market.

Since its creation in 1962 the Advertising Standards Authority has broadly performed well. It is not a government agency and receives no taxpayers’ money, being a watchdog established by the advertising industry for self-regulation. The nature of its remit has inevitably embroiled it in occasional controversy, but it has generally been well regarded until now.

That remit is clear and obvious. Its duty is to protect consumers, to prevent advertisers from selling products through false or inflated claims and to ensure that advertising observes the fundamental decencies. No reasonable person could have any quarrel with that. But that socially useful remit does not, by any stretch of reasoning, legitimise the banning of advertisements on ideological grounds.

Yet that is what has now happened. The banning of the two advertisements, for VW cars and Philadelphia cream cheese produced by Mondelez, was imposed under new ASA regulations that came into force earlier this year prohibiting “gender stereotyping”. That terminology is unmistakably ideological. It does not reflect a consensual concern such as preventing consumers being misled, but a contentious and partisan political concept.

This oppressive judgement signals that the Advertising Standards Authority, like so many other institutions in recent years, has been radicalised by the forces of political correctness. The loaded term “gender stereotyping” is an attempt to demonise what has been a crucial element in advertising for more than a century. Companies, helped by advertisers and researchers, have always sought to identify potential markets and to target their advertising at specific groups of consumers by tailoring their publicity to appeal to them.

That means reflecting the lifestyle of the target group in advertisements. If firms cannot do that, their sales are likely to decline. Consider the faults that the ASA found with the two offending advertisements. The Philadelphia cheese commercial featured two bungling fathers with infants in a restaurant where food circulated on a conveyor belt on which, due to the fathers’ distraction, the babies ended up revolving, though harmlessly.

This was banned because the ASA said it reinforced the idea that men were ineffective child-carers. In fact, many are; others have developed parenting skills, some to a high degree. But all of them recognize that childcare is not an innate, naturally imbued talent in males, but rather an acquired proficiency. None of them, apart from Liberal Democrat men with a papoose on their backs making their way to the Islington laundrette on a Saturday morning, would take offence at this light-hearted portrayal of male incompetence.

In any case, is the ASA’s imposed orthodoxy that all men are effective child-carers not also a reverse stereotyping? But it was with regard to the other banned advertisement, for Volkswagen’s electric eGolf vehicle, that the ASA displayed an extreme PC bias incompatible with its role as a neutral arbitrator.

This advert showed two male astronauts (hardly unrepresentative of the majority of space missions), a male and female rock climber in a tent perched precariously on a cliff face and a woman sitting drinking coffee next to a pram. The ASA condemned the fact that the woman climber was asleep and therefore shown as “passive”; what kind of nit-picking fanaticism could devise such an objection? Most seriously, the woman with the pram was depicted in a stereotypical care-giving role.

So, in the view of the Advertising Standards Authority, care giving is a demeaning activity. That implication is infinitely more offensive than any of the imagined solecisms in the advertisement. It demeans, firstly, almost two million women in the UK who are full-time mothers and beyond them millions more in part-time or full-time employment.

According to the ASA the pram is not a badge of selfless devotion, denoting women who are performing the greatest service of all to society: raising and forming the next generation of citizens. Instead, it is something to be deprecated, a distraction for women who, ideally, ought to be breaking glass ceilings on the boards of firms manufacturing widgets. The devaluing of motherhood and the wider assault on the family is part of the leftist subversion of traditional society.

By compelling advertisers to follow the PC red lines on portrayal of human beings in the roles that, in the majority of cases, they actually fulfil in the real world, the ASA is distorting advertising into ideological propaganda. That is intolerable, primarily because it represents a further closing down of freedom of speech and expression. A secondary consideration, however, is that it also inhibits businesses from interacting effectively with their key target markets.

Over the past century businesses have constantly refined their understanding of where their best sales prospects lie and have used that knowledge to create advertising that will resonate with consumers. That is achieved mainly by creating images with which they will identify; images, that is, of consumers as they actually are, not how cultural Marxists think they ought to be in an imaginary Utopia.

If a woman with a pram appears in an advertisement it is a natural, almost subliminal, reaction for a watching mother to identify with someone like herself. If the most basic aspects of human identity are banned from advertising, how are businesses to connect effectively with consumers? How many mums are going to look at a female astronaut and think: “There’s someone just like me”?

If advertising loses contact with reality, as the world of politics has already done, that does not bode well for economic growth. More important, however, is to halt yet another aggression against freedom. The fact that the ASA is not a government agency offers no reassurance. In totalitarian societies the ultimate goal is not continuing censorship, but to achieve universal self-censorship. That goal was attained in communist East Germany, not an encouraging precedent.

Today, freedoms of all kinds are being extinguished at an exponential rate of acceleration. Government is increasingly intruding into boardrooms with demands for quotas – the most non-capitalist phenomenon imaginable, wholly incompatible with free-market competitiveness. Promotion in companies must be by merit: if that produces an all-women board, then that is fine. The cabinet-making methods of Caroline Lucas are a different matter.

Advertising is at the cutting edge of communication and free expression. It must not become the next domino to fall victim to the advance of PC tyranny. The advertising industry and the businesses it serves must take a firm stand and tell the ASA to scrap its new freedom and enterprise-destroying PC prescriptions.