In case you missed it, a few weeks ago I wrote about some supposedly targeted twitter adverts, that had particularly annoyed me. Apparently, at the grand old age of 34, having had a baby just a few months ago (ok 16 months ago), I should be fending off symptoms of the menopause the “natural” way. What is the natural way to beat the menopause? Well it’s obvious really, shove a plastic coated magnet down your under-crackers of course! What could possibly be more natural than that?
One of the people who commented suggested reporting the company to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). I didn’t initially think it was worth it. I assumed that, although the claims made seemed rather misleading to me, the company would have spent a bunch of money on lawyers to ensure that they were carefully worded to be just within the rules.
But the adverts kept coming.
Even after I wrote a whole blog post taking the p*** out of the product, they were still trying to flog it to me. So I responded in the most mature and sensible way I could think of. I sent a petty and sarcastic tweet in reply to each advert.
But still they came, daily!
Then, one afternoon I found myself watching a long but rather uninteresting experiment at work. I had four hours in a windowless room with only an internet connection to keep me entertained. So I filled in the online complaints form at the ASA.
How much good this has actually done I don’t know but I have now been told by the ASA that other, similar complaints have been made in the past about this company and so their compliance team are taking on the case.
Will this stop the marketing of this kind of junk? No of course not, there is far too much money to be made from using plausible sounding nonsense to flog snake oil.
But you know what?
I’ve not had any of those ads in my twitter feed for at least a week. So, greater good aside, I count that a win!
SBx
southwarkbelle.com 