'Mobiles bake men's balls' bog ad is cobblers - new ruling
Watchdog tuts at anti-phone posters
The anti-phone brigade has been ticked off by the Advertising Standards Authority for running posters declaring that a phone in blokes' jeans could ruin their genes.
The posters, which ran in the toilets at service stations and shopping centres, claimed that "medical experts" are warning that a mobile phone can turn chaps infertile. Even the usually toothless ASA had to object to that, given the lack of empirical evidence that most "experts" would require, so has politely asked the EM Radiation Research Trust not to use the posters again.
Not that the posters will suddenly be torn down today: the publicity campaign only ran up until August 21, and the ASA isn't fining the trust or anything serious like that. The mobe-bashing body just has to rethink the posters.
The ad that appeared above urinals around the UK
The trust did try to fight back, deluging the ASA with inconclusive studies and quoting our old friends the trick-cyclist-backing Council Of Europe, the box-of-frogs outfit that wants the return of the Heliograph and the creation of special radio-free reservations for the paranoid-delusional.
But the ASA decided the wording of the ad would make most readers think there was a consensus of opinion in the medical community that mobiles can cause infertility, while only the unenlightened would claim that was the case.
So the posters won't appear again, at least not in that form, but thousands of people will already have seen them, and quite possibly drawn the erroneous conclusion, much to the delight of the campaigners against stuff. ®
COMMENTS
Seriously ?
They don't even get fined ? Anyone can do this and just get a slapped wrist for being a lying bunch of shitboxes ?
@AC
Please point me to some peer-reviewed research (not quack epidemiology) which backs up these claims and posit a hypothesis for how mobile phones make men infertile.
Or, admit you are probably mistaken. Whichever.
Door left open ....
Nurse, Nurse, someone has left the door open at the asylum again and they have found their way to a computer and the comments page.
Someone get him/her a nice drink of milk and a cookie please and get them back into bed.
and you you are all nutters.
proof
"The Seti Lot have long wondered why they cannot hear anyone out there (in space) quite simple really, an intelligent race gets to analogue RF broadcasting, then discovers digital, gets it genome burnt and either switches over to fiberoptics thereby going dark to outgoing RF transmissions or goes extinct due to too much genetic damage having been inflicted on its population."
or that space is vast, and the chances of us pointing our telescopes at the exact spot to pick up weak signals are quite slim? nah, must be a some sort of conspiracy
"All your false hopes in high technology are going to see...
is the results of your CAT/MRI scan that confirm you have an un-curable CANCER of the brain etc, and you have not long to live........."
I would have gone for a CAT/MRI scan, but it was too high tech for me. I will wait for a CAT/MRI scanner to be developed that is made from stones and woolly mammoth pubes.
