A Welsh coach company has realised the error of its ways and decided to remove oversexualised posters from the back of their fleet.
NAT Group (that stands for New Adventure Travel) had plastered the back of their buses with images of young, attractive people – both men and women, we add – along with the slogan ‘Ride me all day for £3’.
The problem? Apart from suggesting that people can be easily sold or bought for a lol (if sex work is real work it’s got to pay more than £3 a day), it’s needlessly sexualising something that just doesn’t need sexualising – buses are best for getting people from A to B – and, at its base, false advertising.
So it came under fire this morning from many Welsh people (and people from further afield).
Charlotte Church, who’s back in the headlines after heading up Cardiff’s anti-Tory austerity cuts protest at the weekend, told The Debrief: ‘It is totally unacceptable. It's offensive and has echoes of abuse. I think NAT should be made to take them all down and have an apology in their place for being so mindless.’
And lo and behold? NAT Group have issued an apology and will be taking the posters down:
‘Firstly we have stated that our objectives have been to make catching the bus attractive to the younger generation [try setting it out as a place that’s not full of childish humour] We therefore developed an internal advertising campaign featuring males and females [you can say men and women, it’s allowed, honestly!] to hold boards to promote the cost of our daily tickets.’
‘The slogan of ‘ride me all day for £3’ whilst being a little tongue in cheek was in no way intended to cause offence to either men or women [we’d like to think offence knows no gender] and, if the advert has done so then we apologise unreservedly. There has certainly been no intention to objectify either men or women. [‘objectify’ – to ‘degrade to the status of a mere object’ – which we think making a person into a bus kind of does, or did at least]
‘Given the volume of negativity received we have decided to remove the pictures from the back of buses within the next twenty four hours.’
We await the removal with bated breath. Although, as you can see, the apology was a bit of a ‘we were trying to have a laugh and you ruined it and we’re sorry you’re offended’, it’s still some progress on from the likes of Protein World, who’ve been basking in the (fucked up) publicity their (now banned by the Advertising Standards Authority for health reasons) ‘Are you Beach Body ready?’ campaign. Retreating on an ad campaign can hardly seem noble, but we figure a lot of people will be happier to use Nat Group’s buses now these ads are on their way out.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.