The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned ads using cricketers Graham Gooch and Shane Warne, and tennis player Virginia Wade OBE.

Gooch and Warne promoted a cosmetic treatment for hair thinning marketed by Advanced Hair Studio with a national press ad that the ASA said was misleading. Wade OBE promoted a pain relief patch for Lifes2good with a national press ad the ASA also said was misleading.

A PR stunt awarding companies for being female-friendly employers and run by The Times newspaper has been brought into disrepute by the awarding of compensation by a tribunal against its organiser, for bullying employees.

Glenda Stone, who is also the co-chairman of Gordon Brown’s Women’s Enterprise Task Force, for what it’s worth, founded and runs the Where Women Want to Work Top 50 awards, promoted every October by The Times. The tribunal found that Stone, 42, had a “dictatorial and intimidating” style of management, based on evidence supplied by three female employees, and ordered her to pay £28,567.17 compensation to a former employee who she fired for complaining about mistreatment by her.

According to Private Eye, which ran the best story on the case, clients of Stone’s Aurora recruitment company who enter the Times “competition” for an award always get one, which doesn’t say a lot for the integrity of all involved.

Suggestions that smokers might be less attractive to the opposite sex are more likely to persuade them to give it up than warnings of death on cigarette packs.

This is the conclusion of a study at Universities in America and Switzerland which found that those especially influenced by the loss of attractiveness argument were teenagers who smoked to impress, or for peer group approval.

A few years back a TV ad showed two boys discussing a girl who smoked, who they said was “like kissing an old ashtray”

A London theatre is in trouble with Westminster trading standards officers after it quoted selectively from a generally negative review of a play it was staging and made it sound positive.

Wyndham’s Theatre, in its promotion of a flopped theatrical production of The Shawshank Redemption used a quote from a review by critic Charles Spencer which stated that the film was “a superbly gripping, genuinely uplifting prison drama”, and opined that “in almost every respect the stage version is inferior to the movie”. Continue reading →

More than 40% of the 100 million plus unsolicited telemarketing calls made to UK households in November were by loan companies hoping for rich pickings for Christmas.

According to the Call Prevention Registry many are now using pre-recorded sales messages.

Supermarket group ASDA are offering the cheapest trolley of Christmas goods this year. According to a recent survey by The Grocer trade magazine a trolley of 33 items, which included a turkey, Christmas pudding, cards, crackers and champagne, cost £102.08 in ASDA, £105.30 in Tesco, £107.51 in Morrisons, £114.57 in Sainsbury’s and £132.29 in Waitrose, which came out as 30% more expensive than ASDA.

According to the consumers association, Which?, UK supermarkets are the cheapest in Western Europe.

Oh dear. Since the allegation that golf’s most marketed property, Tiger Woods, doesn’t just play a round on the courses the tasteless jokes have come thick and fast, to the extent that some of the sponsors who provide much of Wood’s £60 million a year income for associations with his wholesome image to penetrate their markets are starting to favour withdrawal, with ads featuring Woods being pulled from prime-time TV slots. Continue reading →

State-spying has now become a reality with news that 653 public bodies will be able to snoop on every telephone call, text message, email and website visit made by private citizens.

The excuse given by the government is that of combating terrorism, despite the dismal record of some councils whose employees have used anti-terrorism laws to combat dog-fouling and bin over-filling, and cannot be trusted with the new powers.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is to police advertising on UK websites from late next year, after some funding from Google.

The new remit is expected to also cover claims made on UK blogs and social networking websites but the ASA will have no jurisdiction over non-UK digital media aimed at UK consumers.