Planet Video print ad recreating a scene from ‘The Shining’ too violent for the ASB
A print ad for DVD, video and music store Planet Video which recreated a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film ‘The Shining’ has been deemed too violent by the Advertising Standards Board.
The ad, which appeared in the West Australian ‘Seven Days’ magazine and in the paper’s ‘The Wire’ section in September, depicts two girls in the aisle of a video library dressed in matching outfits and covered in blood with the tagline ‘You see it all at Planet Video’.
The ad watchdog said “that the image, when presented as a print advertisement in a television guide or in proximity to children’s cartoons in a paper is likely to cause a level of alarm to children and that other readers would not necessarily be expecting to come across graphic images such as this”.
It says a lot about our society when ads like this are being pulled because “won’t somebody please think of the children” while you can no longer sit down with your kids to watch a game of footy without being exposed to dozens of gambling ads.
Which has more of a long-term negative impact?
Context is everything. I like the ad, but I wouldn’t want my young kids seeing it.
And I’m not sure why Planet Video thought “relevance” was an argument in defense of the ad. Imagine a condom manufacturer running a sexually explicit ad and arguing “Well, people who buy our product generally use it when they are having sex, so…”
@AH: Valid point. I have nothing against gambling either – provided people do it responsibly and as a form of entertainment – but I’d pull gambling ads from TV too (during “kids” hours).
There’s a company still retailing dvd’s and cd’s???