Katie Price's teasing 'strapline reveal' avoids bust

It's official: Katie Price, AKA once-upon-a-time-glamour-model Jordan, is clueless about the European debt crisis unless an ad campaign takes over her Twitter account and waxes lyrical about economics for the sake of punting a chocolate bar.

Advertising watchdog the ASA batted aside two complaints this morning that challenged Snickers maker Mars Chocolate UK Ltd for hooking into Peter Andre's ex-wife's Twitter account to flog its confectionery to her followers.

Football star Rio Ferdinand also happily allowed his Twitter account to be used for the Snickers campaign, by posting a series of tweets that suggested the England centre back was a big fan of knitting.

The ASA cleared both ads. It said:

We noted the first four tweets in each series served as ‘teasers’, which, due to their nature, were likely to generate additional interest in the celebrities’ postings.

We also noted those tweets did not make any reference to Snickers or to Mars and were posted in relatively quick succession. In addition, we noted that the fifth ‘reveal’ tweets showed the celebrities with the product and included the text 'You’re not you when you’re hungry @snickersUk #hungry #spon ...'.

We considered the combination of those elements was sufficient to make clear the tweets were advertising and that consumers would then understand each series of tweets was a marketing communication.

In that particular context, and given the relevance of the first four tweets to the 'You’re not you when you’re hungry ...' strap line in the ‘reveal’ tweets, we considered it was acceptable that the first four tweets were not individually labelled as being part of the overall marketing communications. We therefore concluded that the ads did not breach the Code.

As we noted previously, no one bothered to complain to the ASA about boxer Amir Khan, cricketer Sir Ian Botham, and X Factor loser Cher Lloyd who were all involved in the ad campaign via their Twitter accounts.

The ASA's response is here. ®