Complete rubbish: long running, low budget, high impact

Here's a campaign that has been running for years, yet can still generate headlines.

The 'offender' is the charity Keep Britain Tidy.  This organisation has been going for nearly 60 years and receives government funding for its campaigns to keep litter off the streets of Britain.  Keep Britain Tidy not only promotes its message, but it commissions research to help it understand what causes the problem in the first place.

The campaign targeted young people with sexual innuendo in the headlines
(pictures from the Daily Mail)

Back in 2002 the organisation found that a problem area was younger people: they didn't respond to conventional appeals either in terms of advertising or enforcement.  Keep Britain Tidy decided to target this audience with humour in advertising. A series of posters and beer mats were produced and these were placed in pubs and clubs frequented by young people.

The campaign uses slogans charged with sexual innuendo which gain impact by being combined with often incongruous images.

The low budget campaign is given regular boosts by what I call third party ostensible demarketing.   The creative execution mirrored other media popular with this age group - for example greetings cards with similar 'retro' photography combined with risque slogans.

In 2005 the posters were criticised by academics for being "lazy" and by the Christian Voice group for being "cheap, tacky and horrible".    Four years later they were back in the mainstream media for the same reasons: this time the complainants were the Plain English Society, whose grumbles brought a low key campaign into national prominence in the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail.  These newspapers and campaign groups seem to represent what I call 'taste guardians' in Bradley & Blythe (2013).

Given the careful targeting of the material it is unlikely that the Plain English Campaign's elderly director had encountered the posters herself.  And as the Keep Britain Tidy spokesman commented, they had been around for years.

Despite the outrage and offence that this campaign can generate, I can find no instance of it being referred to the Advertising Standards Authority during its ten year run.


Sources

• WalesOnline (May 20, 2005) Sex sells - 'but we're simply taking it too far', WalesOnline
• Daily Telegraph (Sept 19, 2009), Keep Britain Tidy campaign should 'bin the filth', say campaigners, Daily Telegraph
• Daily Mail (Sept 19, 2009), Litter charity Keep Britain Tidy told to bin its 'filthy' sexual innuendo posters aimed at young people, Daily Mail