Marketing Mistake - Microsoft

Spending millions of pounds on a television advert allows you too promote your product too millions of viewers, but when your advert is taken of the air and scrapped because of complaints, then it leads to a massive loss for companies... surely the biggest mistake of all is too invest in making of an advert that can't be publicised, or removed because of complaints.

Not only do these mistakes happen in televised advertisements, but the likes of billboards can be also banned.

ASA (Advertising Standard agency)

The organisation that would usually decide whether an advert would be publicised or not would be the ASA. Below is a brief summary of who they are taken directly from their website:

"The Advertising Standards Authority is the UK’s independent regulator of advertising across all media. We apply the Advertising Codes, which are written by the Committees of Advertising Practice. Our work includes acting on complaints and pro actively checking the media to take action against misleading, harmful or offensive advertisements. " www.asa.org.uk

Microsoft

Microsoft creating this advertisement several years back advertising the Xbox 360. It involves a whole subway station shooting each other with pretend guns - their fingers. Although this may look really fun, the advert causes a lot of controversy, especially that fact that it involved people shooting each other in subway stations, a place where there has always been a lot of security risks!

Never the less, I can imagine the cost of producing the advert wasn't cheap, especially using a whole section of a subway (probably a set), and a lot of actors, it just goes to show that even the funny adverts can be banned, so be careful what is said/shown!

Home office - Go home

Not only do large public limited corporations get it wrong, but so do government corporations, an example of this is the UK Home Office. For many reasons this advert was banned, these include

• Misleading information: the threat to put the immigrants to jail is absurd, since the law states that they will just be deported.
• It is near impossible for members of the public to tell whether someone is an "illegal immigrant" or not, this advertisement could have lead to a lot of controversy, and people could have been labelled for racism as a result of this.

Paddy Power -Blind people booting cats

Insulting blind people and kicking cats, what's that got to do with betting?  Paddy Power received 1,313 complaints following this ridiculous marketing mistake. The advert involves a blind football match, where a cat runs onto the football pitch and is booted by one of the footballers, yes some may find this funny, but too air this live on television, surely the knew they would become one of the most complained about adverts in the UK at that time.