linkA little known fact about Transport for London’s ban on ‘junk food’ advertising is that a company doesn’t have to be selling food to fall foul of the rules. If an advert for a West End musical used a picture of a custard pie, it would be rejected.
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The story begins in late November 2018 when someone at TfL with the mildly sinister job title of Customer Marketing & Behaviour Change Executive realised that her organisation could be caught short by the impending changes. She e-mailed staff requesting a comprehensive review of TfL’s in-house advertisements to weed out any depictions of ‘junk food’ that could violate the new rules and embarrass the Mayor. To be on the safe side, it was decided that ‘junk food’ would not only be scrubbed out of TfL’s adverts on public transport, as the ban required, but from all its marketing materials.
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The first casualty of the purge was a biscuit in an advert for TfL’s bus app (see below). This was sent back to the creatives who designed a new ad from scratch at a cost of £4,820.
The cost of editing the maps to make them compliant with TfL’s own rules was £3,400 and it didn’t end there. A further £1,580 was spent covering up an ice cream in a snowman’s hand in an advert promoting the tube’s air conditioning system. £6,355 was spent redesigning the Time Out advert and, as mentioned above, it cost £4,820 to get rid of the biscuit.
In total, the bill for removing food and drink products from TfL’s own advertisements came to £16,155. It is a preposterous use of money and everybody involved seems to have regarded it as such, but, as with the Farmdrop farce that occurred last month, it was not an unintended consequence. The rules are being implemented exactly as they were meant to be. TfL did not back down after the Farmdrop story hit the news because the ban was always supposed to affect products such as bacon and butter. Similarly, it was always designed to affect non-food advertisements, which is why TfL were on the case three months before it took effect.
These outcomes might be ridiculous but they are not accidental. They are what happens when fanaticism becomes normalised. This is how things are now.
