Ladbrokes Fights Back

January 15, 2009

There has been some uproar over at Ladbrokes due to a recent ad campaign that the poker site ran. The poker site showed people doing extreme things to get greater and greater risks, when instead they should have just come to the online poker site and played there. The advertisements were meant as a joke, and were not to be taken seriously – which most people realized. However, it would seem that one person, yes, one person, did not get the humor and the pojer site was ordered to remove the ads.

Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority forced the poker site to pull the commercial, at which point Ladbrokes fired back saying that the decision was wrong and they wanted it overturned. The ASA admits that they only got one solitary complaint, and that was what they based their decision on. Ladbrokes argues that if hundreds of people were upset by it that would be one thing, but just because one person doesn’t have a sense of humor they are dictating what everyone else gets to watch?

The ASA says that the ad broke the rules regarding portraying advertising as adventurous and daring, and that is why the ads had to be pulled. The ad portrays a shark researcher who keeps taking various risks to get that excitement, and the tag line was basically that if he had known about the poker site he would still be alive.

The poker site is calling for a review of the decision by the independent overseer of ASA judgments, and has openly mocked the person who complained. They have taken out ads in national print mockingly apologizing to the person who was offended.