FOUL PLAY.

Television advert avoids being pulled dispute complaints.

Published: 23rd July 2010

The forthcoming World Blind Football Championships has had an unusual amount of free publicity over the past few weeks thanks to a controversial television advert.

Bookie firm, Paddy Power have taken a gamble themselves by showing a blind football team accidentally kicking a cat.

Of course this kind of twisted comes with a price opening the floodgates for complaints, those from disability groups and another from animal lovers.

The Advertising Standards Authority has decided to go against the 1,000 complaints that regard the advertisement encouraging animal cruelty claiming the responses as "so unlikely that it was absurd."

The ASA state that the film does not show the animal being harmed and verifies that not only were all the players blind which are in the advertisement but that the company was sent a letter from the England Blind Football Team (not the team which played in the recent World Cup - although we can understand if there was any confusion!) who support the idea.

The ASA said,

"We considered that the action in the ad would be interpreted by most viewers as a humorous depiction of a fictional situation, with the humour derived from the surreal and improbable circumstances, when an unforeseeable and accidental action occurred.

"We considered it was unlikely to be seen by most viewers as malicious or to imply that blind people were likely to cause harm to animals whilst playing football.

"We therefore concluded that the ad was unlikely to be seen as humiliating, stigmatising or undermining to blind people and was unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence."

We here at ABLE2 side with the ASA, the advertisement shouldn't offend blind people because 1. It's clearly not malicious and 2. They can't see it anyway!

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