ASA bans ad for 'smoking-friendly' app
Thursday, November 27, 2014 at 9:36 I meant to write about this a couple of weeks ago ...
Anyway, further to yesterday's post about the Advertising Standards Authority and our two-year battle over a Department of Health ad that claimed that "just 15 cigarettes cause a mutation that can lead to cancerous tumours", it's worth noting another ASA adjudication on the subject of smoking.
As some of you know, Imperial Tobacco is responsible for an initiative called Smoke Spots. There's a website and a mobile app that allow smokers to find "smoking-friendly places near you".
Primarily this means pubs and bars that have outdoor smoking areas but Smoke Spots doesn't milk the issue.
Quite often, in fact, Smoke Spots will recommend a specific venue and I can't for the life of me see why it should have special appeal for smokers because there's no mention of a smoking area.
Likewise I've never seen a picture of anyone smoking on the Smoke Spots website. (God forbid!)
Visitors have to take it on trust there's a half decent smoking area in the vicinity but there are times when a Smoke Spots email arrives and I feel like shouting, "That looks lovely but where's the smoking area?!"
Needless to say, anti-smoking campaigners don't like Smoke Spots. It's not enough for smoking to be banned in every pub and club in the country. Tobacco controllers also want to deny smokers the most basic information that might help them find a comfortable place to light up outside their own home.
In July the Guardian reported, Health campaigners blast "Smoke Spots" site.
I don't know the outcome of that complaint but a similar complaint was sent to the Advertising Standards Authority which responded as follows:
ASA restricts smoking app ad (Insider Media)
The implication of the ASA's ruling is that by identifying 'smoking-friendly places near you' Smoke Spots is acting as a gateway to smoking. (Where have I heard that before?)
Do they have any evidence that non-smokers have been encouraged to take up smoking as a result of the ad or app in question?
Smoke Spots provides legitimate information for consumers of a legal product, advising them where they can light up in relative comfort without inconveniencing non-smokers.
But instead of telling Cancer Research and other complainants where to go, the ASA fudged the issue. It upheld just one of the six issues it investigated but that was enough for the ads to be banned:
The ASA concluded that the ads must not appear again in their current form and that Smoke Spots must ensure future campaigns do not "condone or encourage an unsafe practice".
See also: Imperial Tobacco ads for smoking app banned by ASA (Marketing)
PS. I first wrote about Smoke Spots in January. With unerring prescience the post was entitled Smoke Spots: enjoy it while you can.
I urge you to visit the site and make it a success. Oh, and spread the word!
Reader Comments (3)
Here's another example of the ASA abusing its powers.
http://www.zoeharcombe.com/2014/11/the-asa-trolls-working-together-to-censor-progressive-thinking/
I find this odd. Some time ago, many of us complained to the ASA about an NHS graphically violent video advert on the internet that showed a smoker getting beaten to death. The ASA washed their hands of it and said they have no remit to decide on those things on the internet, that their remit was to do with TV broadcasts only. Funnily enough, suddenly, the ASA has the right to judge a website because the anti-smoker industry complained about it.
Clearly the ASA lives in the pocket of these thugs and has therefore lost all credibility as an alleged (cough) impartial advertising watchdog.
Silly old Imperial. Surely they know the Tapa rules every bit as well as the antis, and it wouldn’t take Einstein to work out that the antis would whinge loudly about anything even remotely connected to tobacco that wasn’t parroting the “ooh, naughty” meme. What they should have done is started an app called “Smoke-free spots” (or something along those lines), enthusiastically highlighting places reported to them which were particularly unwelcoming towards smokers or in which the facilities were either half-hearted, downright lousy, or completely non-existent, as wonderful places for non-smokers to visit. Places with excellent smoking facilities could be pointed out as particularly bad places for non-smokers to visit. Then, by turning the formula on its head, smokers would be able to tell which places to avoid and, similarly, which places to go to.
It’s how I use many websites these days, because a lot of places are often reluctant to say if they provide good smoking facilities for fear of being “politically incorrect.” So, rather than looking on sites like Smoke Spots for good places for smokers to visit, I look for ones which are particularly bad, and then cross them off the list. Thus, by process of elimination I usually end up with a list of places to go to which are likely to be at least relatively smoker-friendly, and a couple of quick phone calls is then all that’s needed to be certain that you won’t find yourself ending up giving your custom to a company which decides it can treat you like rubbish at the same time as asking you to pay them money! I’m sure that pretty much everyone else on here knows how to tell a good place from a bad one (from a smoker’s perspective) just by reading the language that companies use when talking about their smoking policies, or, indeed, by noticing what they don’t say as much as what they do (after all, if the smoking ban is unimportant enough for a company to make no mention at all of any smoking policy, even in a tiny ad, how likely are they to have put a great deal of time, energy and money into providing decent facilities for smokers?)
I do sometimes think that the tobacco companies, like the pubs, even now, just don’t really know their enemies in the anti-smoking movement. They think they’re still fighting a fair fight (hint to the hospitality and tobacco companies – you’re not!), and they obviously mean well by starting up sites like Smoke Spots, but they’ve got a lot of catching up to do in the areas of cunning and manipulation if they want to avoid being scuppered by the antis at every turn.