An Oldham grass company forced to take down an 'inappropriate' billboard by the advertising watchdog has returned with a new poster showcasing a shirtless man.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) - the UK's independent regulator of advertising across all media - forced Oldham-based Great Grass MCR Ltd to take down a billboard in November last year after ruling it 'objectified and stereotyped women as sexual objects'.
The poster, situated on a busy junction in Hollinwood, where Oldham Road meets the M60 motorway, featured a headline stating the company were 'Artificial Grarse Experts'. Underneath the text was an image of a woman wearing a bikini with text which states: "Perfect 365 days a year...Get laid by the best."
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The ASA’s investigation, which was sparked by complaints, found the poster to be ‘irresponsible and likely to cause serious offence'. At the time, the local company said in response that the advertisement was a ‘bit of light-hearted fun and not intended to offend anyone’.
Having taken the billboard down, the Oldham company replaced it with a new billboard ‘apologising’ to those who found the previous message offensive. In reference to the ASA complaints, the new headline states ‘Apologies to the offended 4’.
“You found it offensive, we all found it funny,” the poster adds. The billboard then features an angry face emoji followed by the number four alongside a laughing face emoji next to 40,000,000.
“Just because you’re offended, doesn’t mean you’re right,” the ad continued. The advertisement ended with a promotional offer for people to quote ‘not offended’ to receive 10% off their next order.
And now, in the billboard saga, Great Grass’ latest billboard reads: ‘Great Abs, Great Grass’ underneath a male model with his shirt off.
Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, a spokesperson said: “The original one had a woman on it in a bikini. We got four complaints about it. One complaint is enough to take it down. They said it was objectifying women.
“We had to take it down. We had 900 comments, 895 of which were positive.
“Then I put the next one up, just saying sorry if we’ve offended anyone but ‘four million people’ found it funny.
“Just because you find something offensive doesn’t mean they're correct.
They said since putting up the new billboard, they’ve received no complaints.
“It’s just tongue in cheek and a bit of fun. People were coming into the shop and saying it’s funny. An elderly woman came in and said it made her day,” they said.
“The world’s gone mad. We had lots of positive comments about it.
“We’ve had a billboard there for five years, we got more business off that three months ago than over the past five years. It obviously works, but that wasn’t the purpose. It was just for a bit of fun.
“We thought it was a bit of a laugh, then all of a sudden we got these four complaints.
“If you say ‘I’m offended by two blobs of ice cream’, that’s the end of it. When does it end? When does common sense take over? It doesn’t seem to end. Why would we want to upset anyone? We’ve got a successful business, we don’t want to upset anybody.”
Of the second billboard, they said it ‘got as much attention’ as the first one. “It had nothing to do with grass, it was just poking fun at them. It’s a bit of fun,” the spokesperson added.
“We’ve got another one coming soon.”
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