4 UK Funeral Ads Banned for widespread offense Amidst Government Investigation into Pricing11/27/2018 The British online funeral planning website Beyond recently had 4 advertisements bound for the UK subway system banned by Transport for London. The playful ads parodied pop-culter ad-styles like those for headache medicine, asking viewers:
Transport for London responded to the ban saying, “Running advertising that is seen by millions of Londoners every day is a serious responsibility and our advertising partner was advised by the Committee of Advertising Practice that the original posters proposed by Beyond were likely to cause serious and widespread offense.”
Indeed, Beyond’s ad scandal comes at a perfect time to catalyze a national conversation about funeral prices in the UK. Last June, 2 separate UK government organizations announced probes into funeral pricing. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is reviewing funeral costs in order to “to ensure that people are not getting a bad deal” and The Treasury is considering tougher regulation of pre-paid funerals and has opened a consultation process. Following the announcement of investigations in June, Dignity (the UK’s largest death care corporation) released a statement. Dignity ‘s head of insight, Simon Cox, commented:
Despite Cox’s pleasure for the investigations, Dignity’s share price fell 14% following the Treasury and CMA announcements re-highlighting its 70% low for the year reached in March… Beyond has worked with Transport for London to revise the ads to be more sensitive and subway-appropriate (and incredibly boring) but the originals still decorate billboards around London. The public outlash surrounding the ads has been shocking because the ads are legitimately funny… although it’s not clear if the media coverage has played up viewer disgust to spice up the story or if fear-of-mortality actually trumps sense-of-humor? From the outside, it appears Beyond has successfully executed a brilliant scheme to simultaneously promote their services far beyond the subway systems (NY Times, Metro UK, BBC News, etc.) and raise awareness for the potential need for UK funeral price reform (which would benefit their business) and the current government investigations looking into it. The UK is consistently about a decade ahead of the United States in terms of funeral care trends which gives us a head start on resolving these issues stateside before we see similar problems of government price investigations, plummeting death care stock prices (Dignity fell 70% this year), and religiously unaffiliated customer needs in a country with a 77% cremation rate. What do you think about Beyond’s ads? Funny or insensitive? The post 4 UK Funeral Ads Banned for “widespread offense” Amidst Government Investigation into Pricing appeared first on Connecting Directors. 4 UK Funeral Ads Banned for “widespread offense” Amidst Government Investigation into Pricing published first on YouTube via Tumblr 4 UK Funeral Ads Banned for “widespread offense” Amidst Government Investigation into Pricing
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