Game of Thrones is one of the biggest franchises in the world, and as such it’s not surprising that businesses try to use its popularity to their advantage. One of the recent and notable instances of such a thing happening was the SodaStream commercial starring The Mountain (Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson) and Septa Unella (Hannah Waddingham). Titled Shame or Glory, the commercial promoted the brand, which produces machines that lets people make their own sparkling water, and showed a guy carrying bottled sparkling water for The Mountain, getting ‘shame’d by Septa Unella. The Mountain is also seen saying : “F*** plastic bottles.” We had later reported about SodaStream getting sued over this commercial. According to latest reports, the ad has been banned.
In case you can’t remember it, watch the advertisement below :
The commercial was been banned over complaints claiming it was offensive, distressing, irresponsibly targeted, and oversold the product but exaggerating its benefits. The National Hydration Council and two civilians have been said to have reported the ad. SodaStream has however said that the advertisement was not actively promoted on Facebook, and that for the ad to be watched on YouTube, one would need to have an account which had the user’s age verified to be over 25. However, both YouTube, and Facebook have admitted that the commercial violated their advertising policies, and that they will ensure that it doesn’t run on their platforms again.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) also seconded the complaints which said that the ad had been irresponsibly targeted, and that SodaStream’s claims that the machine saves 2,190 plastic bottles over three years, were unsupported, and thus misleading. The ASA has directed SodaStream to end the campaign, it said in a statement :
“We told SodaStream to ensure that their ads were targeted appropriately and to avoid using language that was likely to cause serious or widespread offence.
We also told them to ensure that they held sufficient evidence to support all objective claims made in their advertising.”
We don’t see the big deal about the offence, considering how literally anything can be offensive to someone or the other. However, it looks like SodaStream should have taken a little care about their claims before running a campaign so potentially controversial. What do you think? Talk to us in the comments, below!
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