Sporting Index ad caused "serious offence", ASA says
World Cup ad featuring image of Christ the Redeemer with his arm around a bikini clad woman deemed inappropriate
Sporting Index has been reprimanded by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for causing “serious offence” with an advert it ran during the World Cup featuring Christ the Redeemer statue and a bikini-clad woman.
The print advert, which ran in City AM and the Racing Post, depicted a digitally enhanced version of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro with its right arm around a bikini-clad woman and a bottle of champagne in its left hand.
Text on the advert stated “There is a more exciting side to Brazil” and “World Cup excitement guaranteed”.
The ASA received 25 complaints, including one from the Evangelical Alliance, which said the ad was likely to cause “serious or widespread offence”. The ASA itself challenged the advert over whether it linked gambling to sexual success.
The online sports betting company defended the advert and said the statue was “an iconic image that was immediately and readily identifiable and associated with Rio de Janeiro and Brazil as much (if not more so) than with its religious connotations”.
Sporting Index also said that it intended the imagery to be “light-hearted, humorous and cartoon-like instead of true-to-life” and that the champagne bottle was “intended to be tongue-in-cheek” and reflective of Rio de Janeiro’s reputation as a ‘city of fun’.
The ASA said it understood the advert was intended to be humorous and reflected Rio’s beach culture, but the image of Jesus with his arm around a scantily clad woman was “likely to cause offence to a significant number of Christians”.
The regulator also said that the advert breached the Code by linking gambling with sexual success as the figure’s hand was placed just above the woman’s bottom and that she was turned partly towards him, implying a “degree of flirtatiousness and sexual contact”.
Sporting Index was told the advert must not run again in its current form, and to ensure that future adverts did not link gambling to sexual success or cause serious and widespread offence.
The decision sees Sporting Index become the latest online gambling operator to come under fire from the ASA after Paddy Power was required to remove its Oscar Pistorius newspaper ads earlier this year following a record number of complaints.