yonmei

12:56 pm: Heinz homo haters
With reference to the news of last week: total signatures on the reinstate Heinz Mayo ad is now 11595.

"I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a tin of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Now, now... Here's looking at you, kid."

Heinz is one of those homespun blue-collar brands that is a staple of our national diet. Its ketchup has just been voted by consumers as the brand with the most "equity", for goodness sake, after scoring highest against measures such as familiarity and quality. So how did Heinz get it so wrong with this ad?

Having been bold enough (or naive enough ... you choose) to sign-off a script in which two men's lips meet, Heinz was careful to make the whole gay thing a "joke": it's not as though either of the men in the ad is obviously meant to be gay, they both look so straight you could draw a line with them.

But adland knows full well that any suggestion of homosexuality in ads will hit some pressure points (reason enough, you might think, to challenge prejudices). Controversy will have been fully anticipated, and this ad will have been thought through thoroughly before the play button was pushed.

Which makes it all the more astounding, and disappointing, that Heinz was so easily cowed when the inevitable complaints tumbled in. The company wasted no time in sheepishly withdrawing the commercial. Which naturally sparked another row, this time with gay groups: Stonewall and the radio station Gaydar called for a global boycott of Heinz brands in protest.

Really, Heinz couldn't have stirred up more controversy if they'd tried – and a few cynics out there think maybe they did try, that the whole gay saga that dominated marketing headlines last week was a massive PR stunt. If it was, it backfired big time.

What's certainly true is that Heinz has proved itself to be too easily swayed, spineless even. Of course, for all its careful and sensitive self-regulation, sometimes adland gets it wrong and misjudges the nation's mood; advertising that causes genuine and understandable offence should be swiftly withdrawn.

But really, Heinz had an opportunity here to take an enlightened position, to defend the inoffensiveness of a (pretty dispassionate) kiss between two men. If we believe that advertising not only reflects society and its culture but helps shape it, then there are times when advertisers have to take responsibility for the influence they wield.

Heinz may argue that in responding to the complaints and withdrawing the ad it is doing exactly that. But it doesn't seem to have thought carefully enough about the wider message its actions might have sent out: that tacit endorsement of a gay relationship is something to be embarrassed about, to regret. And that's a very dangerous position for one of the nation's favourite brands to find itself in. Claire Beale

And:

. A global brand introduced a new television commercial in which two men were seen (briefly) to kiss on screen, owing to the transformational power of mayonnaise. See, the Book of Revelation just isn't specific enough on the seven signs of the Apocalypse. If only the four horsemen weren't so easily confused with fictional characters in condiments commercials then we wouldn't be in this mess. As it is, the religious right and heathen left are locked in an utterly futile and bombastic ideological row involving countless online petitions about whether Armageddon is signified by the fact of the ad or the pulling of the ad. Which was not banned and neither will it be, if the regulator ever bothers even to look at it.

It turns out that many of the complaints were organised by religious groups in the US, where the ad has never been broadcast. Offence is now apparently a global currency and officially a unit of measurement. I blame the internet. Given that, the BBC board should be rereading the key end-of-the-world signs just to double-check that there's no paragraph suggesting that if a head of marketing shall replace a longstanding head of radio, the bells shall ring and man shall be wiped out. Janine Gibson

I know, I know; it was just an ad. An ad which American news stories have mentioned "it wasn't to be broadcast to children" without specifying that this was because Heinz Mayo contains way too much fat and sugar, not because two men kissed.

But there was something about the way Heinz pulled it so fast, so apologetically, as if they should have realised that showing two men kiss is offensive to right-minded people.

Tell Heinz. Pass it on.

Tags: ***** this fir a kerry oan, angry queer, food politics, i watch tv, writing complaining letters