Talk Radio’s posters to be vetted after ‘naked’ ad causes offence

Talk Radio will be forced to have its posters pre-vetted by the Advertising Standards Authority after it ran an ad featuring a woman’s naked backside which attracted 78 complaints.

Created by Walsh Trott Chick Smith, the poster was designed to promote the Lorraine Kelly show and was part of a 1.5m campaign for the radio station.

The line “Lorraine Kelly prostitution weekdays 11am” ran above a woman’s bare bottom stamped with a barcode.

Chris Reed, external affairs manager for the ASA says: “We considered that many people would see the nudity as unnecessarily shocking and combined with the bar code decided that it would cause serious and wide-spread offence.”

Poster pre-vetting, which was introduced on June 1, means that advertisers who run shocking or offensive poster campaigns will have to submit to pre-vetting of subsequent campaigns for the following two years.

Reed adds: “The poster pre-vetting procedure is designed to prevent the same advertiser going too far.”

Paul Robinson, managing director of Talk Radio, says: “I have no regrets about the campaign at all. I believe it has worked well for the station.

“The campaign was designed to get people talking and it did just that.”