An advert for the mobile app Nude Scanner 3D has been banned in Britain after it was broadcast during a prime time show.
The advert broadcast during six episodes of Channel 4’s Hollyoaks, which screens at 6.30pm, showed images of a naked woman with her crotch and breast blurred out whilst being ‘scanned’ by a mobile phone along with a voice over which said “prank your friends to think you can see what any of them look like without clothes on”.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which received a total of 26 complaints – a few out of which stated that the advert was demeaning to women and was shown while children were watching, decided to ban the advertisement. The advert was already cleared by compliance and clearance agency Clearcast, but with a restriction preventing it from being broadcasted during children’s programmes.
The ASA ruled: “Because the ad focused on the product’s apparent ability to enable the user to view naked images of women using the camera on their phone, and had a prolonged focus on the female model, we considered it was unsuitable for a child audience and was likely to be viewed as demeaning to women and, therefore, offensive.”
“Whilst younger children may not understand the references to a ‘nude scanner’, that was unlikely to be the case for older children and we considered them to be the group most likely to have been interested in downloading the app”, the watchdog concluded.
Jesta Digital GmbH, the app’s developer, which also trades as Jamster, said that said it stopped broadcasting the ad when complaints started coming in.
[Source: ASA]
