Still a relatively new company, Kazam hasn’t exactly gone the right way about promoting its latest smartphone. In fact, the promotion has been banned.
The ASA (Advertising Standards Authority), the UK’s regulatory body on adverts, has decided to not allow Kazam’s new promo onto British television screens as it ‘objectifies women’.
We put that last bit in quotation marks as we are in fact directly quoting them, not because we disagree. The advert’s pretty gratuitous when it comes to exploitation of the female body – in fact of its minute-long run time just ten seconds of it depicts the smartphone in question. The rest is all T&A. Not exactly the best message from an industry that struggles to get women on board.
In fairness to Kazam, the company claims it endeavoured to make sure that the advert would only be shown during appropriate time slots such as when children are unlikely to be watching, but that wasn’t enough to save it from getting the chop.
The logic behind the advert is that the Tornado 348 is supposed to be so slim you wouldn’t notice it in the back pocket of the jeans you were ironing. Naturally, the best way to enhance this point is to have the woman ironing them do so in her underwear. Oh, and to also barely show the phone at all. Good one.
The advert can still be viewed courtesy of the bastion of the free speech which is the World Wide Web, so feel free to watch it at the top of this very page courtesy of Kazam’s official EU YouTube channel and see what you make of it.
