webofevil | Kinder Bueno

< pooter >I like to think I have a sense of humour< /pooter >, but seriously, fuck the team behind this.

Complaint submitted to the ASA: The advert must have been simple to pitch. Two women see a good-looking man enter a sauna. They eat some of the product, which apparently inspires one of them to open the door of the sauna and steal the man’s robe. The man is forced to leave the sauna naked and cover himself as best he can while the women giggle at him.

I don’t know if the ad is homegrown or a redubbed European effort, and I don’t really care; either way it’s unacceptable because of the blatant double standard it is upholding. Very simply, if the ad depicted two men stealing the clothes of an attractive woman and forcing her essentially to run a gauntlet, there would be uproar, and deservedly so.

If that isn’t considered reason enough to censure the ad, how about the fact that a product which, for all that it has tried to brand itself across Europe as “sexy”, is still aimed at children—hence the bright colouring of its packaging and the fact that its brand name includes the word “KINDER”—is here encouraging behaviour that amounts to straightforward bullying?