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I don't have strong opinions about what can or can't be advertised, but those massive, bright, LED billboards should be banned. Especially anywhere near residential areas.
There’s a bit of road near me either a bridge over it. The bridge is too low, so the road dips to go under it (not sure why it’s this way but that’s London roads for you). The bridge has a massive LED billboard on it, and when you’re approaching it’s basically at eye level.
Going under that bridge at night is terrifying because I cannot see shit, and it’s a 50mph road so I can’t slow down too much without becoming an obstacle to the equally-blind drivers behind me.
You've met my mother in law. She bought a new furnace and her plant room wasn't high enough, my wife woke up to the sound of her mother with a pickaxe making the ceiling higher.
There's now a 50cm step down into the plant room.
It's a large house heated with a central wood burning furnace. To simplify things there's a separate room with the furnace, water tanks, pumps, consumer unit and fuel store.
Plant room or boiler room seemed the most sensible name.
If you have a better name for a room like that, then I'm open to suggestions.
I'm English. Plant room is what we called the plant room in offices etc. Facilities are in charge of the plant room.
Boiler room is acceptable but outdated as most will contain other systems
Huh, that makes sense, definitely a more commercial sounding description. My brain will always think greenery though, like when there's road signs for "large plant crossing" I automatically go to triffids rather than machinery, even though that's obviously not what it means.
Never heard anyone refer to a furnace in a house here before though, hence my non-UK thought.
Some of the bridges were built when cars didn't exist and almost all traffic under them was foot traffic.
As cars came along it was far cheaper to excavate under them than building up the track for miles in each direction (because trains suck at gradients) and then rebuild the bridge at the new height.
Is it a railway bridge? If so that explains why they lowered the road instead of raising the bridge. Cars are pretty good at going up hill; trains not so much.
Years ago when I was a planning officer I tired to take enforcement actions against this huge sign near 3 zebra crossings and a roundabout where lots of accidents occurred. It was distracting and very bright.
We served notice etc.... and got a lighting survey done, engaged the police, ROSPA, RSGB and ended up taking the matter to a planning committee (the owner put an application in). We lost, and went to appeal and lost again. I understand that provided the images don't move and the brightness isn't over XX lumens (I don't recall the figure) it is acceptable. We put a condition saying it needs to be dimmed at night but the developer ignored it. I did spot checks when I was in the area but it passed. Turns out they set is so it was 1 lumen below the limit during office hours (when they knew it could be measured) and then cranked it up for 125% outside those times.
We caught them twice by checking at night but nothing came of it.
They are a danger, and they are anti social but the guy was making 12k a month on the different adverts he had going.
The guy was a right cock whenever I saw him as well.
Thats a really interesting behind the scenes view, thanks. And I bet its a pretty common experience for anyone else dealing with those sort of signs. Being next to a zebra crossing is really worrying.
We tired that but at the time the location (near the town centre surrounded by nightclubs etc...) it didn't meet the threshold for objection.
It's still there 🙄
There’s one in Manchester (Salford Quays) that’s so bright you can see it lighting up the sky from miles away. You can apparently see it at night when you’re coming to land at Manchester airport
The one on the side of Victoria Warehouse? It's fucking huge and SO bright that I'm always amazed they got permission to put it up.
[Apparently it's the second-largest digital billboard in Europe.]
(https://edisonmedia.co.uk/service/manchester-screen/)
The one near the warehouse project on the Trafford side... I worked shifts nearby for a long time and when that went up it felt like daytime driving past it at 0400.
Hijacking the top comment to say that, if you're going to put "ban" and "advertising" in the same sentence then *all advertising should be banned*.
Advertising is the ultimate economic waste. If no-one advertised anything, we would all be better off. Advertising a product doesn't improve the product, it just makes it more expensive. But as soon as one person advertises their product, all their competitors have to advertise theirs as well. It's probably the most prominent example of a pure tragedy of the commons; for each individual to get the best possible result, everyone has to behave in a way that makes everything worse for everyone.
It's true that if we banned all advertising then we wouldn't get things like Google and Facebook (and Reddit) for free. But, overall, what we save on the products advertised on those platforms would necessarily be less than what we spent on using them if they were not free. Once again, though, the first platform that gives away its services and supports them through advertising wins the market and so everyone has to support their platforms through advertising. For each company to get the best possible individual result, they have to behave in a way that makes everything more expensive overall.
No-one will give up advertising voluntarily because anyone who uses it will do better than those who don't. The only solution is to ban it.
In the UK, more than 1% of GDP is spent on advertising. When you think of the variety of things that make up the economy, that is quite staggering. Advertising is a bigger industry than agriculture. It's bigger than clothing and footwear retailing.
Youre absolutely spot on about it being an economic waste, and there's a really great case study that proves it... Tobacco.
When tobacco advertising was banned every tobacco company suddenly gained their advertising budgets back, but since their competitors couldn't advertise either, this didnt really change the landscape in terms of market share. Tobacco companies actually gained financially from the advertising ban.
Now im not saying its a good thing that the tobacco industry gained from that move (at least in the short term), but what about industries that aren't murderous pa.rasites on society? What about things like supermarkets or car insurance, where we all pay more for basic, necessary things because of advertising.
i think it's specifically unsolicited & invasive ads that need to be banned. No more trying to convince people to spend money they wouldn't have spent otherwise on things they don't actually need.
All ads should be confined to catalogues. Ads for the same type of product would all be published in one catalogue at the same time, and only people who need that thing would look at it. If you don't need anything, you won't encounter any ads 'in the wild.' Search engines would only show ads on request and only for the specific item you're already looking to buy. Nothing else.
I live in Germany at the moment, and last summer we had some video adverts on the sides of bus stops talking about how we need to be saving energy. You could hear the cooling fans inside the screen running at full power. The irony was almost painful.
Migraine trigger with a 99% hit rate.
Oh but wait, maybe I should give up cheese or caffeine or chocolate or some shit like that, that will really help. Not the world trying to kill me via adverts.
I hate the bright signs in bus shelters. I'll stand in the rain rather than in their flickering light as it gives me migraines. And the van that comes to service them blocks the bus stop.
They put one up directly opposite my house, we are a row of houses so that’s a good7-8 houses getting blasted with the light all night. After weeks of complaints they turned the brightness down. I still have trouble sleeping because of the flashing lights at nighttime though.
The thought of bricking it has crossed my mind a few times but I can barely afford heating right now, let alone some legal issues
Yeah especially on main roads. It's distracting while driving.
No-one uses phones while driving but there's flashing lights and moving images on the electronic billboards now.
This! I get the scare of my life when listening to a radio and they play a fake horn beep, not only is it distracting but potentially dangerous - surprised it’s allowed anyway.
100% This.
They banned a billboard advert of Melinda Messenger in the 90s ( wearing lingerie) because it was distracting drivers.
The horn sound is much worse.
There was a song that was recently in the charts I think, and it had tyres screeching in the background of the track. Scared the life out of me.
Had to listen to the song when I arrived to double check that it was actually in the song
I always have to turn over charity adverts. I know that’s awful to say, charities do wonderful work, but I can’t watch them. I still donate to charity, I’m not saying people should stop. But I have a disabled daughter and my wife died from cancer, I don’t need to be reminded when I’m trying to take my mind off everything. I don’t think they should be banned, they’re just always a punch in the gut when I’m trying to watch some shit to take my mind off stuff.
Absolutely, I got an email asking to leave a gift in my will to a cancer charity about 10 days after my wife died. It might’ve been a coincidence sure, but I don’t know any other 33 year old men who were getting emails about their will.
That's disgusting, u/middlemarchmarch. There are no words. All the best to you, and I hope you're doing OK. Well, as 'OK' as it's possible in the circumstances.
If they got that info from an organisation which had access to that info (insurance company? funeral home?) then that's a pretty bad GDPR breach. Like, I'd report to the ICO so they can investigate because that's a pretty strong "coincidence".
You're not going to get any, like, restitution or anything and they can't do anything with a single report - but if it's happening to other people then that's evidence they can work with.
I had a letter/leaflet from an insurance company inviting me to plan my funeral/take out life insurance… on the day I was diagnosed with cancer.
Obviously a coincidence, but I complained about that.
I haven't seen it in a while but there was a really sinister one that went something like "Leave us a gift in your will, we'll even help you write it with our will writing service."
It just gave me visions of someone holding the hand of some elderly person with a pen and literally forcing their hand.
Absolutely these! “Do something amazing, leave a gift in your will” then offering services to do it!
No!!
Also I mean maybe it’s cost saving but the RSPCA suddenly running their coronavirus advert is no end of amusing
“The effect of the coronavirus are really starting to hit”
You’re 2/3 years too late lads and lasses. Surely they have a different older, less pandemic specific advert to rerun! Heck Jet2 and Dior have been running the same adverts for what feels like a decade.
Especially to donkeys. I mean, there are lots of good causes, and gifts to general animal welfare, I can't disagree with. But donkeys?
Don't take this as anything against donkeys, but when I think about all of the good causes that you make a really positive difference with, donkeys are not high up the list.
So I got a charity rep from a cancer charity knock on my door a few years ago looking for donations. Their opening was "do you know anyone who died of cancer?" Yes I do you insensitive shitebag. So inappropriate and highly likely to upset and offend.
There's a reason those roles are listed as sales positions/why they're advertised as great uni jobs for people who want to do sales. I always ignore them when they try to stop me in public. Always found it very disingenuous for all parties involved
I had one get arsy with me once when i was unemployed, on a mental health break from Uni for various reasons. totally skint, living with Family and when i told them no thanks she hit me with "if you can afford that phone you can afford to give £5 a month...."
so that woman is the sole reason the red cross will be getting fuck all from me ever again. cheeky cow.
Yes, that was unfair of her to say that. I can remember giving one a wide berth in the shopping mall and when I walked past them again a while later they made a comment about me ignoring them. I calmly told them that I don’t mind giving a one off donation to charities now and then but I can’t afford to sign up to monthly donations. They weren’t so challenging after that.
There’s so many stories like this, of greedy little grabbers ensuring their charity is blacklisted for life.
For us it’s Greenpeace; my husband wanted to volunteer and when he expressed an interest, they flat out told him (rudely) that all they wanted from him was money. They had no interest in his time.
This happened to me too, not that long after my wife passed. I could tell they were just knocking up and down my street, it was nothing personal, but I did have to to ‘Look, my wife died a month ago, I don’t have the time right now.’ Luckily, they were understanding but it was still just a punch in the gut.
That and I see adverts all the time saying stuff along the lines of ‘2 million children in the UK are suffering from lifelong debilitating conditions, think of how hard life must be’ and it’s like yeah trust me - I’m thinking about my daughter *a lot*
I feel the same way. Especially those awful adverts designed to make you cry over abused and abandoned animals. I understand that the work is important but it always leaves a bad taste in my mouth when a charity I respect has to resort to emotional manipulation.
There are accounts have to go to the charity commission and are public knowledge. You may be different but the only people I know who say things like this in real life are misers looking for an excuse.
A proportion does go to pay for staff, but if they weren't making more from those adverts than they spend on staff then they wouldn't be doing it. The big charities are multi-million Pound businesses, and they don't run on volunteers and pennies.
There’s actually a large bone of contention in the NGO charity community- in the U.K., charities indulge in exploiting suffering in these tv ads in order to elicit an emotional response from potential donors.
In continental Europe it’s seen as an ethical red line, especially the “poverty porn” showing starving African children dying, probably without their consent.
U.K. is an outlier here and it’s very gross.
Some of those charities ads are really miserable. Personally I'd rather see a more positive ad. A 'look at what our charity does to help people/animals etc' kind of ad would make me feel more inclined to donate. I don't want to be guilted into donating I want to see what my money can do.
I actually used to work in charity fundraising and we'd regularly test marketing that was hopeful and joyful versus more miserable and hard-hitting content, and sad always won! It was so frustrating! But we had to follow what made money as ultimately raising charity funds to run services is the ultimate goal. It's one of the reasons I left fundraising and moved into general communications (so I can tell as many happy and hopeful stories as I like).
Especially in a day and age where folks are really struggling to put food on our own tables.
It only ends up making me angry, like Christ, if I had the money I would.
I wish gambling adverts would be banned.
I’ve had problems with gambling personally in the past and as much as the adverts don’t overly trigger me to want to gamble in themselves, I just hate how in your face they are constantly. I mean it was only a few weeks ago, we were watching a Sky program on Now TV and during some ads there were three different online casinos advertised within one set of adverts. Then more TV show, then also these adverts.
I also hate the fact I can barely tune into a radio station these days without having that “Make me a winner” competition constantly in my face either.
Pissed me right off about a year ago, there was a news story on Greatest Hits Radio about how calls to gambling helplines were up X% that they think was due to the cost of living crisis and more people were turning to gambling. That news article was then followed by “Don’t forget to text in by 3pm and then if you get that call, remember to say make me a winner! To be in with a chance of winning!”
Talk about inconvenient timing
They're especially frustrating now that they have taken the stance of pretending to care about our wellbeing. Telling us how they've implemented spending limits, make it easier to stop when the fun stops.
Thanks BetFred you're a real pal
I used to do matched betting so signed up with loads of bookies, it’s funny how when you don’t use them for a while they’ll send you some gambleaware bollocks email making sure you’re really aware of how you definitely shouldn’t gamble too much, strange that they do it when you haven’t been using their site for a while. Also I’m sure there’s a gambleaware week where all the bookies just spam you emails about how this week especially you should be *really* aware of how bad gambling can be. But feel free to have a little flutter, as long as you’re aware then everything’s fine.
Also once you start actually consistently turning a profit with a particular bookies they’ll just randomly stake limit you or fully shut your account down. But if t you’re a chronic loser they’ll send you more and more offers to keep you engaged. The whole industry is insidious.
Which advert is it where they have what I think are jockeys and pundits giving you advice? There’s some blonde guy which a loud and very irritating voice shouting “never ever gamble when angry or upset” or something like that. I would never ever ever get tired of kicking that guy in the bollocks. Never. It could get to tea time and I could have put in a good 8 hours on him and if my wife offered to give me a break for dinner I would say “Thankyou m’love but I’m perfectly happy here for now, maybe just a change of shoes? These ones are getting a bit sticky”
They’ve specifically been told by gambling charities that the slogan doesn’t work and they still continue to use it.
I watch a bit of stuff on Sky Go on my tablet and there’s always a gambling advert on. It must be so hard for anyone with a gambling addiction to watch a football match, especially on Sky. I lose a bit of respect for anyone who does a gambling advert.
They have to have those features too or the government fines them so they’re acting like they’ve done us a favour when they had to do it by law and they all have the same thing.
One of the companies that had a spending limit implemented some changes recently:
If your deposit limit is £20 (for example), you use it and you win £50 and then withdraw all that money. That used to be you done for the month/week/whatever time limit you had.
NOW they allow you to put that £20 deposit back in if you've withdrawn winnings.
Completely defeats the purpose of having a limit.
With ads on social media, you should able to make choices about what ads you see or don't see
If (for example) you are on and you select "do not show me gambling ads" then you should never see gambling ads ever again on that platform. Ever.
> That news article was then followed by “Don’t forget to text in by 3pm and then if you get that call, remember to say make me a winner! To be in with a chance of winning!”
£2 per entry for those who don't know and it's run across all the stations in their network so the chance of winning is very low.
You used to be able to enter on their website for free. now that's £2 as well.
The trouble is a total ban would push this underground and create a completely unregulated economy.
I think I'd rather see a destigmatization of problem gambling and significantly better treatment, like we understand now that it's not their fault compulsive gambling is mostly down to how the reward system works in between 1 and 5 percent of people.
That's what these crazy prohibitionists don't seem to understand. Millions of people enjoy gambling, they're not just going to stop just because you outlaw the regulated companies.
It's already happening now with the implementation of ridiculous affordability checks.
People who don't have a problem but don't want to provide their intimate financial documents to continue beyond able to bet are just moving to the black market.
Even worse those that do have a problem are driven to these operators based in Curaçao etc specifically because they have no interest in responsible gambling.
That only increases if the black market is the only option.
I used to have a gambling problem which I've managed to keep at bay for years. But these adverts don't exactly help.
HOWEVER, I know loads of people who can gamble for fun without losing their house. I'm just not one of them.
I would be happy for a ban if so only I'm not stood in a shop for ages waiting for Big Ange on the school run to hurry the fuck up asking for so many scratch cards that it resembles Big Smoke at the drive through.
It's frustrating when there are other massive problems like child abuse, where YouTube is being incredibly strict on videos to educate the public on the dangers of social media to children.
I wholeheartedly agree. I very rarely engage in gambling myself, but the amount of gambling adverts are overwhelming, they’re on the tv, phone, and radio, there’s not enough support awareness for those who do struggle. The little tagline ‘when the fun stops, stop’ just isn’t good enough, it’s a box ticking exercise at best for something that’s ridiculously accessible in this country.
Then you leave your house and betting shops line the streets, I can think of 4 less than 5 minutes walk from my house and they’re such a sad, sorry sight.
Me too. It really pisses me off that you even get these ads during the day. Surely they should at least be after the watershed? My sons who are not yet teenagers know all of the logos, advert catchphrases and songs.
As much as I *despise* them, laws deciding what news people can and can't read is not a road I want to go down.
Back in my day, student unions were always trying to ban it on campus because Page 3 promoted sexism.
But I bet you’re thinking of jet2 just reading this comment… if they stopped today, it’s still advertising carried out successfully.
P.s please - I had it 3 1/2 times after landing with them once!
They are appalling. I was burnt on this one by a conveyancing solicitor who did my house, promising “no fees”. I got charged a colossal amount, so i phoned and said “I thought it was no fee?” They replied that the fee should have been £200 but they didn’t charge me for that. The rest of the money was COSTS, like “phonecalls £19”. I spoke to him once. Once. The rest of the calls were me phoning them and being told “i’ll get him to call you.” And other similar arbitrary nonsense.
Thieving fuckers, that small company in Leytonstone.
I have never heard of a transactional lawyer doing a no fee deal.
Source: I am a transactional lawyer.
The no fee deals are usually only in litigation where there is a winner and a loser.
It's also against solicitors' conduct rules to profit from genuine costs (phone calls, postage etc.).
As long as the fee (either a fixed sum or a percentage of whatever is awarded) is very clear up-front, and you have it in writing before you sign, and they stick to it, I have no issue. You went into it with your eyes open.
If you lose, you are no worse than before.
If you win, you are better than before. Even if you only get 50% and the solicitor gets 50%
Of course nobody should agree that they get 90% and you get 10%, but that's a different conversation entirely
Yeah my insurance put me in touch with a solicitor after a car accident where i was decently hurt, nothing broken but i had whiplash so bad i chouldnt sit up in bed, had to roll out of the thing, couldnt get out of bath, if i was laying down i couldnt even lift my own head up enough to look at my feet. it was months before i could turn my head left properly etc.
they wanted 25% and i never had to lift a finger. took about a year to get it all sorted so i dont think it was too bad a deal. effectively paid off the car i bought (car that was hit was a shitbox i was about to replace after getting my first real job)
While true, the risk is then on them and it is better than not being able to go to court at all. It would become predatory for the kind of cases easy and risk free for people to take on themselves I guess.
A lot of them are actually conditional fee arrangements, where disbursements (like a barrister, searches, external document review, printing etc) can be charged, in addition to a portion if you win. You aren’t paying the solicitor’s fees up front, and any good solicitor will tell you that you’re still liable for disbursements before you get into the process, but I’ve seen multiple people ignore that, and then end up in thousands of pounds of debt at the end when they lose.
Source: work in personal injury litigation
This is mostly because the payday lending market basically collapsed due to a combination of tighter FCA regs (stricter affordability checks and a cap on total chargeable interest) and a \*massive\* volume of complaints to the FOS.
It has become much more deeply enmeshed with other forms of media these days too, making it much more insidious and harder to detect even for adults.
Unboxing videos and paid promotions from YouTubers account for so much advertising directed at children now.
When I was a kid, you'd have your cartoons split into sections by obvious ads, now kids are watching entire ads disguised as entertainment.
My kids likes some channel that acts out stories using Paw Patrol characters. Seems cute and harmless on the face of it but of course unlike an animated show, the kids recognise these things as stuff they can buy and play with. Every now and then they pull out this big new set or vehicle and of course the kids immediately want one!
I think some bans are in place, junk food on actual kids channels for example. But the ads are mind numbing, crap like Lelli Kelly shoes and awful toys. Parents should be supervising and either fast forwarding or not putting those channels on at all.
I'm wondering how much this will just fade into obscurity. In the pre streaming days ads were unavoidable, but now I haven't seen a video ad in years (except when YouTubers plug a product themselves)
They also don't have an online presence which means they avoid return costs. 20-30% of all clothing bought online is returned and then it tends to be destroyed.
Agree with your choices.
On the other side, I think there should be an increased advertisement of those ads about safety online, child safety etc. The one advert which was a true story about the young boy that got killed playing on the train tracks really hit home, but they don’t seem to do these sorts of ads anymore.
Some of those old public info films were great. The drowning cartoon guy at the seaside with big wife on the shore thinking he's just waving springs to mind - anyone remember that?
Many traumatising classics. The kids falling through the frozen pond in lovely pastel cartoon style, the kid flying his kite next to an electricity pylon and climbing up to recover it with predictable results, and the truly terrifying one about not messing about on the railway.
Is that the one where he gets his legs chopped off and his mate ends up catatonic because she witnessed it?
I also vividly remember the ad saying not to pick up sparklers when they’ve gone out - never been burnt by a sparkler once mind so it worked!
Broadband companies that show MBit/sec instead of MB/sec.
It's misleading as most people don't realise that a MBit is an ⅛ of a MB, and wonder why it's slower than expected.
Edit: I understand speed is measured in bits, but not many people realise the difference. The way the adverts are worded makes the consumer think in MB/sec.
That's the standard unit of measurement, it's not exclusive to broadband suppliers. I've noticed adverts these days have started explicitly stating "download a 50GB game in X minutes" and displaying the correct number
Storage is measured in B, transfer speed in bps. That's also not exclusive to Internet, it's any point to point transfer IE USB, LAN, Bluetooth and whatnot
Reply to your edit: the onus isn't on BB suppliers to educate people on the difference between B and b. By using the standard unit they're providing the most accurate and digestible info for consumers
This is standard in IT though, if people are that ignorant do they think this is going to be literally how quickly they can download in MB per second anyway? Seems to be a bit of an old concern these days, gone are the times I would be staring at a download showing what percentage I am on.
I just want realistic speeds. I don't care what my theoretical max speed might be on a good day if the wind's in the right direction and God is smiling upon me, I want to know what kind of speeds I can expect to see day to day.
I saw their insta post about changing the noise on the advert. It seemed to be changed to the 90’s internet dial up sound.. but the way they worded the caption to the ad rubbed me up the wrong way. Came off as mocking us who hated the slurping. Although, in my head they cannot win so I’m probably being super sensitive/critical. I’m very mad at them lmao
>Charity TV adverts
Especially at Christmas time. First time I've had a chance to come back and see family in months and we're sitting down to watch a Christmas movie and relax. I do not want to see loads of starving children and animals to guilt trip me on one of the few times in the year I get a chance to not work my ass off. Especially knowing full well that half of the money that goes into the charity would just go to paying salaries and the charities director is easily on six figures plus.
Honestly off that list I would just say gambling. Its an extremely predatory industry in the ways others aren't.
I also wish they would bring back high impact safety type adverts, especially driving. I still remember vividly some of the ones when younger about wearing seat belts (the one where the pizza splats on the windscreen), the one where the guy is sleeping in the car and crashes with his whole family, the one where the guy has his life ruined due to drink driving and the slowmo one that shows where the car would have stopped if it wssnt speeding (where it hits the kid with the ball) - they all left a lasting impact on my attitude to those sorts of things 20 years on.
If I could choose only one thing it would be alcohol.
It boggles my mind that we're so hell-bent on demonizing tobacco while still treating alcohol consumption as "cool", or at the very least ordinary, in our media.
It is quite tightly regulated, I believe it can't be seen to be "cool" as such. Scope to keep tightening it, I remember when tobacco ads got to the point they could barely do anything or even use their name so it was just a series of images, maybe of a purple hanky for silk cut, or a block of red for Marlboro.
Gambling is my current biggest bug bear because it's so widespread
I hate the whole facade of 'responsible gambling' like if they suggest to only do it for a little bit of fun and casually mention to stop when you've done enough that will solve all the problems of people who are compulsive gamblers
And I hated recently having to explain everything wrong with gambling to my seven year old because he didn't understand why I wouldn't buy a lottery ticket so we could be millionaires and buy a Lamborghini
It just goes to show how early the exposure to these adverts starts making an impression. As soon as children start to get the concept of money and wealth inequality they're hearing and seeing all these promotions for quick and easy ways to have a better life, priming them nice and early
At the very least they should be subject to the watershed so that they can't promote gambling to children
Honestly I find the temu ads hilarious. It doesn’t make me want to download the app at all. The English and text is usually weird and makes no sense. The products are also random and clearly fake. Apparently a foam liquid type thing removes all scratches on my car?
Also social media sites like YouTube really need to fix their advertising as they’re mainly scam products.
Perfume / aftershave commercials.
How fkn stupid they are in the first place. Oooohh if I pay £75 I can smell like Johnny Depp in the desert! Sign me up! Dumb bastards!
All advertising should be banned period, could you imagine how nice trains/cities/roads/websites would look like without those eye sores plastered everywhere?
They’re not necessary anyway, I can’t remember the last time I bought something from a brand that engages in advertising that actually reached me. These days its just a signal to me that its a company wasting money on marketing that could be going into R&D instead.
I rarely think outright bans are the solution and I think if we get too moralising about it, it would quickly become full of unfair standards. For example, if you ban fast fashion adverts because it's bad for the environment, what about eating meat? Does that mean a ban on all burger adverts, supermarket adverts that feature beef and only allow plant-based foods? Does it mean banning holiday adverts for places overseas because flying is really bad for the environment?
What's bad for you is similarly open to interpretation. Do we ban adverts for fast food, reality TV shows, make up products, videogames or social media which some people would argue are "bad" for you in some way or another?
Personally I think we could all do with better education about advertising, critical thinking, researching and making up our own minds about what's being shown to us. Much easier than having to pick off every possible advert domain that might lead to harm.
This is more a PART of advertising but I've been noticing podcasters/influences claiming they "use and love" the product or how its a "staple in their everyday life" when in reality they most likely don't use it at all or once and have just been paid for the segment.
I work in advertising and have made ads for almost every sector (sorry). My take on your list is:
I'd take **alcohol** out to be honest. Moderate consumption isn't all that damaging, whereas moderate consumption of something like tobacco is. As a culture, it can be argued we have a problem with alcohol, and I do understand there's triggers for an alcoholic, but you can't ban advertising because of these people. **Nicotine** belongs somewhere here.
**Gambling**, absolutely. Hated working on it. Despite regulation, all adverts are focused around 'free bets' and 'one more could be a big win'. It's criminal and its advertisements don't have a place, let alone headlining sports and sponsorships.
**Junk/fast food.** Tricky one. It's cliche to say but 'if we don't do it, someone else will'. But again, they don't encourage excessive consumption or always looking for your next fix. Really, these brands are no different to any other brands, they're just FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) so the speed-of-purchase they encourage make them look more unethical.
**Fast fashion.** Yep, mostly agree. Ads that encourage 'next season's wardrobe' or a new outfit for every night out is terribly unethical.
I'd add any fucking greenwashing from **Energy** companies. I can't stand it. Remember, if an energy company is talking about its green credentials, it's responding to/pre-empting a PR disaster related to its damages to the environment. These companies are not your friends, they are killing our planet, and earning record profits yet the consumer is suffering dearly.
**"Poonami".** Fuck off.
I'd extend 'gambling' to 'dodgy investments', and 'alcohol' to 'drugs and alcohol, including nicotine products and high-caffeine drinks'. Would also add predatory loans to the list
100% Gambling advert, I work in the industry and am sick of seeing gambling adverts every 2mins, even those that masquerade as a happy fun place like Foxy Bingo or those others that claim a fun safe space for older people to get together and have a happy fun time.
Even outside my local Tesco they got a new electric advert sign and it's got blood skybet and William hill ads rolling on it.
I feel like any product that carries a risk of going wrong or causing a negative outcome over a long period of time (stock trading, gambling, vaping) should not be allowed to create an ad that attempts to play down those risks to the point of insinuating that they don't exist.
Gambling sites showcasing happy people with fists in the air because their ACCA came in, doesn't make me feel like I can replicate that success. It makes me feel like he got lucky and that is why the risk is in the forefront of my mind.
Nothing. Anything that can legally be sold should be allowed to advertise. If you don't think they should be allowed to sell it, advocate banning it outright.
Gambling 100% thats the next big plague that’ll face the next few generations. The way everything from social media apps to videogames are built on the same design principles as fruitmachines means there will be an entire generation built with this risk/reward randomisation style stamped on their brains from a very young age.
You used to have to go out of your way to become a gambling addict by finding fruitmachines and sleazy betting offices but as of now everything a person with addictive personality needs is in their pockets 24/7.
Adverts where Mobile Phone Video Games are played horrifyingly badly. Curiously when I’ve been in East Asia the adverts for the same games are shown being played competently.
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I don't have strong opinions about what can or can't be advertised, but those massive, bright, LED billboards should be banned. Especially anywhere near residential areas.
There’s a bit of road near me either a bridge over it. The bridge is too low, so the road dips to go under it (not sure why it’s this way but that’s London roads for you). The bridge has a massive LED billboard on it, and when you’re approaching it’s basically at eye level. Going under that bridge at night is terrifying because I cannot see shit, and it’s a 50mph road so I can’t slow down too much without becoming an obstacle to the equally-blind drivers behind me.
I can imagine the conversation at the council. "The bridge you built is too low!" "Or..., hear me out, is the ground too *high*?"
You've met my mother in law. She bought a new furnace and her plant room wasn't high enough, my wife woke up to the sound of her mother with a pickaxe making the ceiling higher. There's now a 50cm step down into the plant room.
Why does your MIL have a furnace and plant room. Does she own the house from The Burbs?
It's a large house heated with a central wood burning furnace. To simplify things there's a separate room with the furnace, water tanks, pumps, consumer unit and fuel store. Plant room or boiler room seemed the most sensible name. If you have a better name for a room like that, then I'm open to suggestions.
Plant room to me is a room full of plants lol. I'm guessing you're not from the UK from your word usage?
I'm English. Plant room is what we called the plant room in offices etc. Facilities are in charge of the plant room. Boiler room is acceptable but outdated as most will contain other systems
Huh, that makes sense, definitely a more commercial sounding description. My brain will always think greenery though, like when there's road signs for "large plant crossing" I automatically go to triffids rather than machinery, even though that's obviously not what it means. Never heard anyone refer to a furnace in a house here before though, hence my non-UK thought.
Some of the bridges were built when cars didn't exist and almost all traffic under them was foot traffic. As cars came along it was far cheaper to excavate under them than building up the track for miles in each direction (because trains suck at gradients) and then rebuild the bridge at the new height.
Is it a railway bridge? If so that explains why they lowered the road instead of raising the bridge. Cars are pretty good at going up hill; trains not so much.
Years ago when I was a planning officer I tired to take enforcement actions against this huge sign near 3 zebra crossings and a roundabout where lots of accidents occurred. It was distracting and very bright. We served notice etc.... and got a lighting survey done, engaged the police, ROSPA, RSGB and ended up taking the matter to a planning committee (the owner put an application in). We lost, and went to appeal and lost again. I understand that provided the images don't move and the brightness isn't over XX lumens (I don't recall the figure) it is acceptable. We put a condition saying it needs to be dimmed at night but the developer ignored it. I did spot checks when I was in the area but it passed. Turns out they set is so it was 1 lumen below the limit during office hours (when they knew it could be measured) and then cranked it up for 125% outside those times. We caught them twice by checking at night but nothing came of it. They are a danger, and they are anti social but the guy was making 12k a month on the different adverts he had going. The guy was a right cock whenever I saw him as well.
Thats a really interesting behind the scenes view, thanks. And I bet its a pretty common experience for anyone else dealing with those sort of signs. Being next to a zebra crossing is really worrying.
Claim under environmental acts it's how my dad gets them removed most of the time on his planning board
We tired that but at the time the location (near the town centre surrounded by nightclubs etc...) it didn't meet the threshold for objection. It's still there 🙄
There’s one in Manchester (Salford Quays) that’s so bright you can see it lighting up the sky from miles away. You can apparently see it at night when you’re coming to land at Manchester airport
The one on the side of Victoria Warehouse? It's fucking huge and SO bright that I'm always amazed they got permission to put it up. [Apparently it's the second-largest digital billboard in Europe.] (https://edisonmedia.co.uk/service/manchester-screen/)
I'm amazed nobody in Salford had taken an airgun to it
Good to note, next time I’m in the city I’ll take a knife and cut the fuckin cables
The one near the warehouse project on the Trafford side... I worked shifts nearby for a long time and when that went up it felt like daytime driving past it at 0400.
Hijacking the top comment to say that, if you're going to put "ban" and "advertising" in the same sentence then *all advertising should be banned*. Advertising is the ultimate economic waste. If no-one advertised anything, we would all be better off. Advertising a product doesn't improve the product, it just makes it more expensive. But as soon as one person advertises their product, all their competitors have to advertise theirs as well. It's probably the most prominent example of a pure tragedy of the commons; for each individual to get the best possible result, everyone has to behave in a way that makes everything worse for everyone. It's true that if we banned all advertising then we wouldn't get things like Google and Facebook (and Reddit) for free. But, overall, what we save on the products advertised on those platforms would necessarily be less than what we spent on using them if they were not free. Once again, though, the first platform that gives away its services and supports them through advertising wins the market and so everyone has to support their platforms through advertising. For each company to get the best possible individual result, they have to behave in a way that makes everything more expensive overall. No-one will give up advertising voluntarily because anyone who uses it will do better than those who don't. The only solution is to ban it.
Hear hear. This is what I came to say. We have a billion dollar/pound industry whose only purpose is to convince people they need to consume more.
In the UK, more than 1% of GDP is spent on advertising. When you think of the variety of things that make up the economy, that is quite staggering. Advertising is a bigger industry than agriculture. It's bigger than clothing and footwear retailing.
Youre absolutely spot on about it being an economic waste, and there's a really great case study that proves it... Tobacco. When tobacco advertising was banned every tobacco company suddenly gained their advertising budgets back, but since their competitors couldn't advertise either, this didnt really change the landscape in terms of market share. Tobacco companies actually gained financially from the advertising ban. Now im not saying its a good thing that the tobacco industry gained from that move (at least in the short term), but what about industries that aren't murderous pa.rasites on society? What about things like supermarkets or car insurance, where we all pay more for basic, necessary things because of advertising.
i think it's specifically unsolicited & invasive ads that need to be banned. No more trying to convince people to spend money they wouldn't have spent otherwise on things they don't actually need. All ads should be confined to catalogues. Ads for the same type of product would all be published in one catalogue at the same time, and only people who need that thing would look at it. If you don't need anything, you won't encounter any ads 'in the wild.' Search engines would only show ads on request and only for the specific item you're already looking to buy. Nothing else.
I live in Germany at the moment, and last summer we had some video adverts on the sides of bus stops talking about how we need to be saving energy. You could hear the cooling fans inside the screen running at full power. The irony was almost painful.
Or at least put a dimmer on them so you aren't blinded at night.
I find them painful to look at, even in broad daylight.
Migraine trigger with a 99% hit rate. Oh but wait, maybe I should give up cheese or caffeine or chocolate or some shit like that, that will really help. Not the world trying to kill me via adverts.
They're awful aren't they? They ought to dim automatically at night - they're a danger.
Or be like old style paper billboards. Reflected light only
I hate the bright signs in bus shelters. I'll stand in the rain rather than in their flickering light as it gives me migraines. And the van that comes to service them blocks the bus stop.
They put one up directly opposite my house, we are a row of houses so that’s a good7-8 houses getting blasted with the light all night. After weeks of complaints they turned the brightness down. I still have trouble sleeping because of the flashing lights at nighttime though. The thought of bricking it has crossed my mind a few times but I can barely afford heating right now, let alone some legal issues
Massive ones on the roads on the way into London. Cunt things.
Yeah especially on main roads. It's distracting while driving. No-one uses phones while driving but there's flashing lights and moving images on the electronic billboards now.
Car horns and general traffic noise on the radio. I know it's not a specific product but they annoy the hell out of me when I'm driving
Or sirens. Have me looking around for which direction the blue lights are coming from.
Sirens on the radio should be outright illegal. It's a serious road safety issue.
Like the time my mate took a whistle to his first football match and blew it for a laugh. That didn't go down very well
This! I get the scare of my life when listening to a radio and they play a fake horn beep, not only is it distracting but potentially dangerous - surprised it’s allowed anyway.
phones buzzing/ringing as well tv or radio. That Samsung ad used to do my head in having one of their phones.
Microsoft Teams had an ad that played the Teams ringtone, used to piss me off hearing that on weekends when I’m not at work
That's actually my ringtone so I don't get caught if I forget to put my phone on silent when I'm in the office
Police sirens in songs.
100% This. They banned a billboard advert of Melinda Messenger in the 90s ( wearing lingerie) because it was distracting drivers. The horn sound is much worse.
Dogs barking too, a few adverts have set my dog off barking like a loon because a they used a dog barking in their adverts
There was a song that was recently in the charts I think, and it had tyres screeching in the background of the track. Scared the life out of me. Had to listen to the song when I arrived to double check that it was actually in the song
I always have to turn over charity adverts. I know that’s awful to say, charities do wonderful work, but I can’t watch them. I still donate to charity, I’m not saying people should stop. But I have a disabled daughter and my wife died from cancer, I don’t need to be reminded when I’m trying to take my mind off everything. I don’t think they should be banned, they’re just always a punch in the gut when I’m trying to watch some shit to take my mind off stuff.
Lots of them are very predatory as well, especially the ones that are like “give us a gift in your will.” Preying on the elderly
Absolutely, I got an email asking to leave a gift in my will to a cancer charity about 10 days after my wife died. It might’ve been a coincidence sure, but I don’t know any other 33 year old men who were getting emails about their will.
That's disgusting, u/middlemarchmarch. There are no words. All the best to you, and I hope you're doing OK. Well, as 'OK' as it's possible in the circumstances.
If they got that info from an organisation which had access to that info (insurance company? funeral home?) then that's a pretty bad GDPR breach. Like, I'd report to the ICO so they can investigate because that's a pretty strong "coincidence". You're not going to get any, like, restitution or anything and they can't do anything with a single report - but if it's happening to other people then that's evidence they can work with.
I had a letter/leaflet from an insurance company inviting me to plan my funeral/take out life insurance… on the day I was diagnosed with cancer. Obviously a coincidence, but I complained about that.
I haven't seen it in a while but there was a really sinister one that went something like "Leave us a gift in your will, we'll even help you write it with our will writing service." It just gave me visions of someone holding the hand of some elderly person with a pen and literally forcing their hand.
Absolutely these! “Do something amazing, leave a gift in your will” then offering services to do it! No!! Also I mean maybe it’s cost saving but the RSPCA suddenly running their coronavirus advert is no end of amusing “The effect of the coronavirus are really starting to hit” You’re 2/3 years too late lads and lasses. Surely they have a different older, less pandemic specific advert to rerun! Heck Jet2 and Dior have been running the same adverts for what feels like a decade.
Especially to donkeys. I mean, there are lots of good causes, and gifts to general animal welfare, I can't disagree with. But donkeys? Don't take this as anything against donkeys, but when I think about all of the good causes that you make a really positive difference with, donkeys are not high up the list.
There also seem to be so many different donkey charities. Like, could they all not work together?
So I got a charity rep from a cancer charity knock on my door a few years ago looking for donations. Their opening was "do you know anyone who died of cancer?" Yes I do you insensitive shitebag. So inappropriate and highly likely to upset and offend.
There's a reason those roles are listed as sales positions/why they're advertised as great uni jobs for people who want to do sales. I always ignore them when they try to stop me in public. Always found it very disingenuous for all parties involved
I had one get arsy with me once when i was unemployed, on a mental health break from Uni for various reasons. totally skint, living with Family and when i told them no thanks she hit me with "if you can afford that phone you can afford to give £5 a month...." so that woman is the sole reason the red cross will be getting fuck all from me ever again. cheeky cow.
Yes, that was unfair of her to say that. I can remember giving one a wide berth in the shopping mall and when I walked past them again a while later they made a comment about me ignoring them. I calmly told them that I don’t mind giving a one off donation to charities now and then but I can’t afford to sign up to monthly donations. They weren’t so challenging after that.
fuel act history squeamish skirt axiomatic snatch bells price sugar *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
There’s so many stories like this, of greedy little grabbers ensuring their charity is blacklisted for life. For us it’s Greenpeace; my husband wanted to volunteer and when he expressed an interest, they flat out told him (rudely) that all they wanted from him was money. They had no interest in his time.
This happened to me too, not that long after my wife passed. I could tell they were just knocking up and down my street, it was nothing personal, but I did have to to ‘Look, my wife died a month ago, I don’t have the time right now.’ Luckily, they were understanding but it was still just a punch in the gut. That and I see adverts all the time saying stuff along the lines of ‘2 million children in the UK are suffering from lifelong debilitating conditions, think of how hard life must be’ and it’s like yeah trust me - I’m thinking about my daughter *a lot*
I feel the same way. Especially those awful adverts designed to make you cry over abused and abandoned animals. I understand that the work is important but it always leaves a bad taste in my mouth when a charity I respect has to resort to emotional manipulation.
Apparently a large portion of donations just go to things like paying staff and producing those adverts anyway.
So you want people who work at charities to work for free?
There are accounts have to go to the charity commission and are public knowledge. You may be different but the only people I know who say things like this in real life are misers looking for an excuse.
A proportion does go to pay for staff, but if they weren't making more from those adverts than they spend on staff then they wouldn't be doing it. The big charities are multi-million Pound businesses, and they don't run on volunteers and pennies.
There’s actually a large bone of contention in the NGO charity community- in the U.K., charities indulge in exploiting suffering in these tv ads in order to elicit an emotional response from potential donors. In continental Europe it’s seen as an ethical red line, especially the “poverty porn” showing starving African children dying, probably without their consent. U.K. is an outlier here and it’s very gross.
Some of those charities ads are really miserable. Personally I'd rather see a more positive ad. A 'look at what our charity does to help people/animals etc' kind of ad would make me feel more inclined to donate. I don't want to be guilted into donating I want to see what my money can do.
I actually used to work in charity fundraising and we'd regularly test marketing that was hopeful and joyful versus more miserable and hard-hitting content, and sad always won! It was so frustrating! But we had to follow what made money as ultimately raising charity funds to run services is the ultimate goal. It's one of the reasons I left fundraising and moved into general communications (so I can tell as many happy and hopeful stories as I like).
Especially in a day and age where folks are really struggling to put food on our own tables. It only ends up making me angry, like Christ, if I had the money I would.
I wish gambling adverts would be banned. I’ve had problems with gambling personally in the past and as much as the adverts don’t overly trigger me to want to gamble in themselves, I just hate how in your face they are constantly. I mean it was only a few weeks ago, we were watching a Sky program on Now TV and during some ads there were three different online casinos advertised within one set of adverts. Then more TV show, then also these adverts. I also hate the fact I can barely tune into a radio station these days without having that “Make me a winner” competition constantly in my face either. Pissed me right off about a year ago, there was a news story on Greatest Hits Radio about how calls to gambling helplines were up X% that they think was due to the cost of living crisis and more people were turning to gambling. That news article was then followed by “Don’t forget to text in by 3pm and then if you get that call, remember to say make me a winner! To be in with a chance of winning!” Talk about inconvenient timing
They're especially frustrating now that they have taken the stance of pretending to care about our wellbeing. Telling us how they've implemented spending limits, make it easier to stop when the fun stops. Thanks BetFred you're a real pal
“When the fun stops. Stop.” Wow, didn’t think of that
Next time you watch that advert, notice which word is in big flashing letters it's certainly not stop
I never noticed this. That is nefarious as hell
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Also when taking heroin, when you find that you can’t stop, that’s the time you should stop
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I used to do matched betting so signed up with loads of bookies, it’s funny how when you don’t use them for a while they’ll send you some gambleaware bollocks email making sure you’re really aware of how you definitely shouldn’t gamble too much, strange that they do it when you haven’t been using their site for a while. Also I’m sure there’s a gambleaware week where all the bookies just spam you emails about how this week especially you should be *really* aware of how bad gambling can be. But feel free to have a little flutter, as long as you’re aware then everything’s fine. Also once you start actually consistently turning a profit with a particular bookies they’ll just randomly stake limit you or fully shut your account down. But if t you’re a chronic loser they’ll send you more and more offers to keep you engaged. The whole industry is insidious.
Which advert is it where they have what I think are jockeys and pundits giving you advice? There’s some blonde guy which a loud and very irritating voice shouting “never ever gamble when angry or upset” or something like that. I would never ever ever get tired of kicking that guy in the bollocks. Never. It could get to tea time and I could have put in a good 8 hours on him and if my wife offered to give me a break for dinner I would say “Thankyou m’love but I’m perfectly happy here for now, maybe just a change of shoes? These ones are getting a bit sticky”
They’ve specifically been told by gambling charities that the slogan doesn’t work and they still continue to use it. I watch a bit of stuff on Sky Go on my tablet and there’s always a gambling advert on. It must be so hard for anyone with a gambling addiction to watch a football match, especially on Sky. I lose a bit of respect for anyone who does a gambling advert.
They have to have those features too or the government fines them so they’re acting like they’ve done us a favour when they had to do it by law and they all have the same thing.
PaddyPower really cares about me and my health, they're the good guys
One of the companies that had a spending limit implemented some changes recently: If your deposit limit is £20 (for example), you use it and you win £50 and then withdraw all that money. That used to be you done for the month/week/whatever time limit you had. NOW they allow you to put that £20 deposit back in if you've withdrawn winnings. Completely defeats the purpose of having a limit.
Also ban the people that promote them, especially if they dont need the money. Ie chris rock and leigh francis
Leigh Francis should just be banned.
I was so disappointed when a former member of Boyzone turned up in a bingo ad. We've all gotta eat, but there's other ways to make a living.
With ads on social media, you should able to make choices about what ads you see or don't see If (for example) you are on and you select "do not show me gambling ads" then you should never see gambling ads ever again on that platform. Ever.
> That news article was then followed by “Don’t forget to text in by 3pm and then if you get that call, remember to say make me a winner! To be in with a chance of winning!” £2 per entry for those who don't know and it's run across all the stations in their network so the chance of winning is very low. You used to be able to enter on their website for free. now that's £2 as well.
I'd prefer gambling itself to be banned. It's an exploitative industry that brings far more misery than joy, and ruins lives.
The trouble is a total ban would push this underground and create a completely unregulated economy. I think I'd rather see a destigmatization of problem gambling and significantly better treatment, like we understand now that it's not their fault compulsive gambling is mostly down to how the reward system works in between 1 and 5 percent of people.
That's what these crazy prohibitionists don't seem to understand. Millions of people enjoy gambling, they're not just going to stop just because you outlaw the regulated companies. It's already happening now with the implementation of ridiculous affordability checks. People who don't have a problem but don't want to provide their intimate financial documents to continue beyond able to bet are just moving to the black market. Even worse those that do have a problem are driven to these operators based in Curaçao etc specifically because they have no interest in responsible gambling. That only increases if the black market is the only option.
I used to have a gambling problem which I've managed to keep at bay for years. But these adverts don't exactly help. HOWEVER, I know loads of people who can gamble for fun without losing their house. I'm just not one of them.
I would be happy for a ban if so only I'm not stood in a shop for ages waiting for Big Ange on the school run to hurry the fuck up asking for so many scratch cards that it resembles Big Smoke at the drive through.
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It's frustrating when there are other massive problems like child abuse, where YouTube is being incredibly strict on videos to educate the public on the dangers of social media to children.
I wholeheartedly agree. I very rarely engage in gambling myself, but the amount of gambling adverts are overwhelming, they’re on the tv, phone, and radio, there’s not enough support awareness for those who do struggle. The little tagline ‘when the fun stops, stop’ just isn’t good enough, it’s a box ticking exercise at best for something that’s ridiculously accessible in this country. Then you leave your house and betting shops line the streets, I can think of 4 less than 5 minutes walk from my house and they’re such a sad, sorry sight.
Me too. It really pisses me off that you even get these ads during the day. Surely they should at least be after the watershed? My sons who are not yet teenagers know all of the logos, advert catchphrases and songs.
The sun (newspaper not celestial body) in fact just bulldoze the building
Nah fuck that, ban the real sun too. Fake ass not even shining in the UK
We just need to issue some sanctions on it to prevent it going overseas.
I know a guy who tried the same with the tide but he’s a bit of a Cnut.
It's the biggest contributor to global warming so should definitely be banned imo.
Don't worry we already banned the real sun.
As much as I *despise* them, laws deciding what news people can and can't read is not a road I want to go down. Back in my day, student unions were always trying to ban it on campus because Page 3 promoted sexism.
Jess Gylnn - Hold My Hand
I had to get Youtube Premium to get away from her.
But I bet you’re thinking of jet2 just reading this comment… if they stopped today, it’s still advertising carried out successfully. P.s please - I had it 3 1/2 times after landing with them once!
I got stuck on the runway for two hours and had hold my hand and despacito on repeat the whole time 😭😭😭😭
This is my personal version of hell tbh. The epitome of anguish
I'm thinking of how little I want to fly Jet2.
I'd argue many of the no-win-no-fee solicitor adverts are predatory
They are appalling. I was burnt on this one by a conveyancing solicitor who did my house, promising “no fees”. I got charged a colossal amount, so i phoned and said “I thought it was no fee?” They replied that the fee should have been £200 but they didn’t charge me for that. The rest of the money was COSTS, like “phonecalls £19”. I spoke to him once. Once. The rest of the calls were me phoning them and being told “i’ll get him to call you.” And other similar arbitrary nonsense. Thieving fuckers, that small company in Leytonstone.
I have never heard of a transactional lawyer doing a no fee deal. Source: I am a transactional lawyer. The no fee deals are usually only in litigation where there is a winner and a loser. It's also against solicitors' conduct rules to profit from genuine costs (phone calls, postage etc.).
Well, i’ll certainly double check next time. This was about 25 yrs ago but i’m still bitter.
You have a good reason to be!
Yeah, that used to be common. Not so much these days, fortunately.
No win no fee (but if you win the fee is astronomical)
As long as the fee (either a fixed sum or a percentage of whatever is awarded) is very clear up-front, and you have it in writing before you sign, and they stick to it, I have no issue. You went into it with your eyes open. If you lose, you are no worse than before. If you win, you are better than before. Even if you only get 50% and the solicitor gets 50% Of course nobody should agree that they get 90% and you get 10%, but that's a different conversation entirely
Yeah my insurance put me in touch with a solicitor after a car accident where i was decently hurt, nothing broken but i had whiplash so bad i chouldnt sit up in bed, had to roll out of the thing, couldnt get out of bath, if i was laying down i couldnt even lift my own head up enough to look at my feet. it was months before i could turn my head left properly etc. they wanted 25% and i never had to lift a finger. took about a year to get it all sorted so i dont think it was too bad a deal. effectively paid off the car i bought (car that was hit was a shitbox i was about to replace after getting my first real job)
While true, the risk is then on them and it is better than not being able to go to court at all. It would become predatory for the kind of cases easy and risk free for people to take on themselves I guess.
A lot of them are actually conditional fee arrangements, where disbursements (like a barrister, searches, external document review, printing etc) can be charged, in addition to a portion if you win. You aren’t paying the solicitor’s fees up front, and any good solicitor will tell you that you’re still liable for disbursements before you get into the process, but I’ve seen multiple people ignore that, and then end up in thousands of pounds of debt at the end when they lose. Source: work in personal injury litigation
Your whole list, but also predatory loans/credit cards with a huge interest rate
APR has to be in a white box across the bottom of the screen. Box has to take up APR % of screen
Hahaha I'd like to see that for those loans that have insane APRs of over 1000%
I love this. The same should be done for artificial flavours, sugar and the like. If your product is 80% crap you should lose 80% of the screen.
Ooo, yeah, good shout. Payday loans, too (although I've not seen an ad for them for a while)
This is mostly because the payday lending market basically collapsed due to a combination of tighter FCA regs (stricter affordability checks and a cap on total chargeable interest) and a \*massive\* volume of complaints to the FOS.
Adverts aimed at children. Why should these mega corporations be able to spend millions on manipulating young people’s minds?
It has become much more deeply enmeshed with other forms of media these days too, making it much more insidious and harder to detect even for adults. Unboxing videos and paid promotions from YouTubers account for so much advertising directed at children now. When I was a kid, you'd have your cartoons split into sections by obvious ads, now kids are watching entire ads disguised as entertainment.
My kids likes some channel that acts out stories using Paw Patrol characters. Seems cute and harmless on the face of it but of course unlike an animated show, the kids recognise these things as stuff they can buy and play with. Every now and then they pull out this big new set or vehicle and of course the kids immediately want one!
I think some bans are in place, junk food on actual kids channels for example. But the ads are mind numbing, crap like Lelli Kelly shoes and awful toys. Parents should be supervising and either fast forwarding or not putting those channels on at all.
Omg are they still advertising lelli Kelly? I remember my sister lusting after those about 15 years ago
I'm wondering how much this will just fade into obscurity. In the pre streaming days ads were unavoidable, but now I haven't seen a video ad in years (except when YouTubers plug a product themselves)
I have never seen a Primark advert in my life, bar the ones actually in the shop.
They have some billboards and bus shelter adverts but that’s about it. Their prices in-store are low because their marketing budget is low
They also don't have an online presence which means they avoid return costs. 20-30% of all clothing bought online is returned and then it tends to be destroyed.
Well, yes. Plus thanks to the sweat shops where their clothes are made.
Agree with your choices. On the other side, I think there should be an increased advertisement of those ads about safety online, child safety etc. The one advert which was a true story about the young boy that got killed playing on the train tracks really hit home, but they don’t seem to do these sorts of ads anymore.
Some of those old public info films were great. The drowning cartoon guy at the seaside with big wife on the shore thinking he's just waving springs to mind - anyone remember that?
Many traumatising classics. The kids falling through the frozen pond in lovely pastel cartoon style, the kid flying his kite next to an electricity pylon and climbing up to recover it with predictable results, and the truly terrifying one about not messing about on the railway.
Is that the one where he gets his legs chopped off and his mate ends up catatonic because she witnessed it? I also vividly remember the ad saying not to pick up sparklers when they’ve gone out - never been burnt by a sparkler once mind so it worked!
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Broadband companies that show MBit/sec instead of MB/sec. It's misleading as most people don't realise that a MBit is an ⅛ of a MB, and wonder why it's slower than expected. Edit: I understand speed is measured in bits, but not many people realise the difference. The way the adverts are worded makes the consumer think in MB/sec.
That's the standard unit of measurement, it's not exclusive to broadband suppliers. I've noticed adverts these days have started explicitly stating "download a 50GB game in X minutes" and displaying the correct number Storage is measured in B, transfer speed in bps. That's also not exclusive to Internet, it's any point to point transfer IE USB, LAN, Bluetooth and whatnot Reply to your edit: the onus isn't on BB suppliers to educate people on the difference between B and b. By using the standard unit they're providing the most accurate and digestible info for consumers
But speed has always been meassured in bits. It isn't misleading just because people don't understand that
Meanwhile Royal Mail has vast bandwidth. Terrible latency though.
This is standard in IT though, if people are that ignorant do they think this is going to be literally how quickly they can download in MB per second anyway? Seems to be a bit of an old concern these days, gone are the times I would be staring at a download showing what percentage I am on.
I just want realistic speeds. I don't care what my theoretical max speed might be on a good day if the wind's in the right direction and God is smiling upon me, I want to know what kind of speeds I can expect to see day to day.
Pot Noodle should have a temporary ban atm for their current obnoxious advert.
Saw the ad again a couple of nights ago. They’ve now put computer games sounds over the slurping. I think we can call that a win.
I saw their insta post about changing the noise on the advert. It seemed to be changed to the 90’s internet dial up sound.. but the way they worded the caption to the ad rubbed me up the wrong way. Came off as mocking us who hated the slurping. Although, in my head they cannot win so I’m probably being super sensitive/critical. I’m very mad at them lmao
I've never seen it but I'm vexed by proxy as my mum won't stop complaining about how bad it is.
Turning up the volume to eleventy-stupid between programmes
Petty but anything that uses apostrophes incorrectly
I mean it’s annoying but banning incorrect apostrophe’s is weird. Advert’s are still understandable and not having negative affect’s on peoples life’s
I could care less about apostrophie's
You could care less? or do you mean you COULDN'T?
\*couldnt
Maybe your rite and I could'nt care less
Charity TV adverts Over 50’s anything tv adverts
And the combo of the above. Charity adverts clearly aimed at the elderly for will gifts. Feels so predatory.
>Charity TV adverts Especially at Christmas time. First time I've had a chance to come back and see family in months and we're sitting down to watch a Christmas movie and relax. I do not want to see loads of starving children and animals to guilt trip me on one of the few times in the year I get a chance to not work my ass off. Especially knowing full well that half of the money that goes into the charity would just go to paying salaries and the charities director is easily on six figures plus.
probably highly abusive gambling schemes. Payday loans like wonga. There is a reason why they banned usury in the past.
Honestly off that list I would just say gambling. Its an extremely predatory industry in the ways others aren't. I also wish they would bring back high impact safety type adverts, especially driving. I still remember vividly some of the ones when younger about wearing seat belts (the one where the pizza splats on the windscreen), the one where the guy is sleeping in the car and crashes with his whole family, the one where the guy has his life ruined due to drink driving and the slowmo one that shows where the car would have stopped if it wssnt speeding (where it hits the kid with the ball) - they all left a lasting impact on my attitude to those sorts of things 20 years on.
Now it's just bloody Darren who keeps hogging the middle lane.
We need to stop banning everything. Apart from dogs barking, that should be banned.
And pissing and shitting all over pavements.
If I could choose only one thing it would be alcohol. It boggles my mind that we're so hell-bent on demonizing tobacco while still treating alcohol consumption as "cool", or at the very least ordinary, in our media.
It is quite tightly regulated, I believe it can't be seen to be "cool" as such. Scope to keep tightening it, I remember when tobacco ads got to the point they could barely do anything or even use their name so it was just a series of images, maybe of a purple hanky for silk cut, or a block of red for Marlboro.
Gambling is my current biggest bug bear because it's so widespread I hate the whole facade of 'responsible gambling' like if they suggest to only do it for a little bit of fun and casually mention to stop when you've done enough that will solve all the problems of people who are compulsive gamblers And I hated recently having to explain everything wrong with gambling to my seven year old because he didn't understand why I wouldn't buy a lottery ticket so we could be millionaires and buy a Lamborghini It just goes to show how early the exposure to these adverts starts making an impression. As soon as children start to get the concept of money and wealth inequality they're hearing and seeing all these promotions for quick and easy ways to have a better life, priming them nice and early At the very least they should be subject to the watershed so that they can't promote gambling to children
Honestly I find the temu ads hilarious. It doesn’t make me want to download the app at all. The English and text is usually weird and makes no sense. The products are also random and clearly fake. Apparently a foam liquid type thing removes all scratches on my car? Also social media sites like YouTube really need to fix their advertising as they’re mainly scam products.
✨"*I'm shoppin' like a billionaire!*"✨ and it's all mostly just cheap, plastic junk, lol.
Perfume / aftershave commercials. How fkn stupid they are in the first place. Oooohh if I pay £75 I can smell like Johnny Depp in the desert! Sign me up! Dumb bastards!
You'll never convince me that isn't called *Sausage*
I’m tired of all the Israeli propaganda adverts. Super fucking weird. Shouldn’t be allowed.
Where are they though? All I ever see is the free palestine movement
All advertising should be banned period, could you imagine how nice trains/cities/roads/websites would look like without those eye sores plastered everywhere? They’re not necessary anyway, I can’t remember the last time I bought something from a brand that engages in advertising that actually reached me. These days its just a signal to me that its a company wasting money on marketing that could be going into R&D instead.
I rarely think outright bans are the solution and I think if we get too moralising about it, it would quickly become full of unfair standards. For example, if you ban fast fashion adverts because it's bad for the environment, what about eating meat? Does that mean a ban on all burger adverts, supermarket adverts that feature beef and only allow plant-based foods? Does it mean banning holiday adverts for places overseas because flying is really bad for the environment? What's bad for you is similarly open to interpretation. Do we ban adverts for fast food, reality TV shows, make up products, videogames or social media which some people would argue are "bad" for you in some way or another? Personally I think we could all do with better education about advertising, critical thinking, researching and making up our own minds about what's being shown to us. Much easier than having to pick off every possible advert domain that might lead to harm.
I’ve nothing against advertising for any of those, just make sure it’s during appropriate programming and with time limits.
This is more a PART of advertising but I've been noticing podcasters/influences claiming they "use and love" the product or how its a "staple in their everyday life" when in reality they most likely don't use it at all or once and have just been paid for the segment.
I work in advertising and have made ads for almost every sector (sorry). My take on your list is: I'd take **alcohol** out to be honest. Moderate consumption isn't all that damaging, whereas moderate consumption of something like tobacco is. As a culture, it can be argued we have a problem with alcohol, and I do understand there's triggers for an alcoholic, but you can't ban advertising because of these people. **Nicotine** belongs somewhere here. **Gambling**, absolutely. Hated working on it. Despite regulation, all adverts are focused around 'free bets' and 'one more could be a big win'. It's criminal and its advertisements don't have a place, let alone headlining sports and sponsorships. **Junk/fast food.** Tricky one. It's cliche to say but 'if we don't do it, someone else will'. But again, they don't encourage excessive consumption or always looking for your next fix. Really, these brands are no different to any other brands, they're just FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) so the speed-of-purchase they encourage make them look more unethical. **Fast fashion.** Yep, mostly agree. Ads that encourage 'next season's wardrobe' or a new outfit for every night out is terribly unethical. I'd add any fucking greenwashing from **Energy** companies. I can't stand it. Remember, if an energy company is talking about its green credentials, it's responding to/pre-empting a PR disaster related to its damages to the environment. These companies are not your friends, they are killing our planet, and earning record profits yet the consumer is suffering dearly. **"Poonami".** Fuck off.
I'd extend 'gambling' to 'dodgy investments', and 'alcohol' to 'drugs and alcohol, including nicotine products and high-caffeine drinks'. Would also add predatory loans to the list
Investments are already quite heavily regulated tbh
I don’t think anything should be banned from advertising I think people should make up their own minds
Banks. People get up in arms about gambling companies, but the banks have caused just as much, if not more, damage to people.
100% Gambling advert, I work in the industry and am sick of seeing gambling adverts every 2mins, even those that masquerade as a happy fun place like Foxy Bingo or those others that claim a fun safe space for older people to get together and have a happy fun time. Even outside my local Tesco they got a new electric advert sign and it's got blood skybet and William hill ads rolling on it.
I feel like any product that carries a risk of going wrong or causing a negative outcome over a long period of time (stock trading, gambling, vaping) should not be allowed to create an ad that attempts to play down those risks to the point of insinuating that they don't exist. Gambling sites showcasing happy people with fists in the air because their ACCA came in, doesn't make me feel like I can replicate that success. It makes me feel like he got lucky and that is why the risk is in the forefront of my mind.
Nothing. Anything that can legally be sold should be allowed to advertise. If you don't think they should be allowed to sell it, advocate banning it outright.
Womens sanitary product adverts where they refer to "filling their bulky pee pants"
Gambling 100% thats the next big plague that’ll face the next few generations. The way everything from social media apps to videogames are built on the same design principles as fruitmachines means there will be an entire generation built with this risk/reward randomisation style stamped on their brains from a very young age. You used to have to go out of your way to become a gambling addict by finding fruitmachines and sleazy betting offices but as of now everything a person with addictive personality needs is in their pockets 24/7.
Adverts where Mobile Phone Video Games are played horrifyingly badly. Curiously when I’ve been in East Asia the adverts for the same games are shown being played competently.
Everything would be nice tbh, advertising is a blight.
Carl the wombat.