I get my news during the day from Stuff.co.nz. Often they're more tolerable than NZ Herald, often they're bang on par. I just saw a news story titled World Cup advert 'unlikely to offend'. Granted, it made me look. On closer inspection I realised that this was another non-story, paraphrased from a press release.
The story talks about a complaint about the ANZ ad where a couple fire a giant party popper from the top of Ruapehu. It goes on to say that the complaint was rejected.
I visited the Advertising Standards Authority website and found that it wasn't rejected, it had 'no grounds to proceed'. That's the equivalent of someone bursting into the ASA screaming 'this ad offends me' and the ASA waving their hand and saying 'get this man out of my office'. It was barely even considered. THAT'S NOT NEWS!
There were 15 other decisions released yesterday, 10 of which had 'no grounds to proceed'. Why did they choose this one? Probably because it had all those great elements that get the punters clicking: "World Cup", "Pakeha", "Iwi", "Party Popper". They probably wanted us to get all full of national pride and say 'have they no sense of humour?!'. Well I did one better, I wasted part of a Friday afternoon blogging about it and directing traffic to the article.
By the way, if you really want to get all riled up about the lack of humour some individuals possess then visit the ASA website and read some of the full decisions. There's not having a sense of humour and then there's this.
Sincerely,
J. Milledge
