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Mitsubishi Canada’s latest television ad begins airing today with a fairy tale theme, but getting it on air was no walk in the woods.
The spot, created by BBDO Toronto for Mitsubishi’s Lancer model, is based on the fable of The Frog Prince. It shows a woman finding a kissable frog while driving through a forest and turning him into a prince on horseback.
Seeing the Lancer, the prince jumps into her car and drives away, leaving her with the horse and a look of dismay.
Before cutting to the closing product shot, a super appears briefly at the bottom of the screen that says, “After his drive, the prince swiftly returned. The End.”
That super was added to address concerns from Telecaster Services, the ad standards organization affiliated with the Television Bureau of Canada, which took issue with the image of a woman being abandoned in the woods.
When asked for comment, Theresa Treutler, president and CEO of TVB, cited sections of Telecaster’s ad standards guidelines that the ad seemed to violate.
“The general public’s health and safety should be taken into account,” says one section, and later “the encouragement of an illegal activity, inappropriate behaviour or the bullying of others is unacceptable.”
“He’s stealing her car,” Treutler said. “The act of abandoning her in the middle of nowhere is not covered in our guidelines in black and white. It’s just a sensitivity that we feel.”
However, the Telecaster guidelines do include the statement “all creative will meet the requirements of these member-approved guidelines, realizing there can be no clearly defined set of criteria that would be acceptable to all viewers. No guideline can anticipate every possible scenario that may be problematic, however, TVB Telecaster Services expects each depiction will comply with the intent and spirit of not only these objectives but of each individual guideline as well.”
“I predict they’re going to get a lot of backlash,” Treutler said, adding that the issue was made worse by the fact that the ad was submitted late and in its final form and not as a draft script, as is normally the case.
“It’s not Telecaster’s objective to make it difficult to get advertising to air, that’s why we have the guidelines posted publicly and that’s why the process is established,” Treutler said.
Peter Renz, director of national marketing for Mitsubishi, called the addition of the super “ridiculous.”
“[Telecaster] told our agency they felt it’s not good to leave a woman stranded on the road,” Renz said. “When we were developing this, our legal counsel said we should leave the horse there so she technically had a way to get out of the place,” said Renz. “But [Telecaster] took this to the extreme… I’ve come across this a lot of times and I’m frustrated right now. This isn’t protecting the public.”
Representatives from BBDO Canada were not available for comment.
An e-mail given to Marketing shows the ad had passed standards screening with CBC Media Sales without the qualifying super, which has a separate approval process because CBC is publicly owned. (Telecaster vets ads destined for Canada’s privately owned broadcasters, including Canwest and CTV.)
“If we wanted to play the extreme, we could just cancel all the money out of our Telecaster [media buys],” Renz said.
Renz said Mitsubishi’s American arm is considering running his Canadian-made creative, which would mark the third consecutive BBDO Toronto Mitsubishi ad to air south of the border.
