We must have heard this insightful phrase, “With great power comes great responsibilities.” And when it comes to advertising and promoting the brand, the responsibility becomes twofold. With this in mind, the recent release of a “Land Rover ad” has been a topic of ongoing concern for several days. To give an illustration of what I mean, let’s look at the video below, in which the three defenders disembarked from a ship, powered down straight to the desert, and finally scraped on the uneven surface to park against a cliff edge. The last few seconds of the video show how the Land Rover cuts short of a cliff in the course of reversing. The cause of concern arises when the two viewers report that there is no such sensing technology in these contemporary off-road vehicles that detects a hollow space behind them, thereby signaling them to stop.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK received these two complaints, reporting that these vehicles can only sense hard or rocky objects behind them through their ultrasonic transducer technology, giving drivers a signal to stop through a slight beep rather than coming to a halt by detecting a deep valley at the back. However, this disturbing concern was hurled back by the “Jaguar Land Rover”, stating that it was depicted in the video that the defender was reversing towards a large rock, which had caused a beep. Notwithstanding this explanation, the ASA came back with unpredictable remarks. According to the authorities, rocks behind the defender are not “entirely visible,” which has the greatest possibility to give a misleading concept to viewers regarding the parking, thus posing a great threat to their safety.
In view of this, ASA said, “Because we understood the car’s parking sensors reacted to objects behind the vehicle, rather than to empty space such as a drop, and the rocks were not sufficiently prominent to counter that interpretation, we concluded that the ads misleadingly represented the parking sensor feature.”
Having said that, this thrilling Land Rover ad gets banned in the UK over the complaint of “two” viewers, but there’s no doubt in it that safety is the first and foremost priority, and ASA hasn’t compromised on it. Thus, complying with the regulations of ASA, the Land Rover company adhered to this adjudication, “We will, of course, abide by their ruling, which was based on only two complaints.”
