The Clarion Gaming website has an interesting take on the Advertising Standards Authority’s (ASA) recent report in which only seven TV gambling adverts were found to contravene its regulations, including one related to bingo – it shows gambling advertisements in the UK demonstrate an “exceptionally high compliance rate”, according to the ASA.

The one offending ad relating to bingo was by the National Bingo Gaming Association, that champion of land-based bingo. I quote from the Clarion Gaming article detailing why the ASA found their ad to be questionable:

The televised ad featured “a woman buying items … marked with an oversized bingo pen. The advertisement finished with the woman buying a mansion for her relatives before spotting a jogger with surgically enhanced breasts. After looking at the breasts with envy, the woman pushed her chest out and the bingo pen hovered over the jogger’s breasts.” The ASA says the ad suggests that gambling can improve self-image or self-esteem.

The ASA has written to the offending advertisers requesting that the ads be withdrawn so that no fines or penalties will be imposed.

The poor old National Bingo Gaming Association – they must think the whole world is against them, what with smoking bans and double taxes decimating the land-based bingo industry and more and more people opting to play online bingo games. Now their advertising is a mess too (I know of no online bingo halls offering surgically enhanced breasts as a prize).

On the bright side, we can now safely conclude that online bingo carries a clean bill of health with the ASA and is also clear of surgically enhanced breasts with the recent departure of Katie Price from ‘fronting’ (pun intended) Foxy Bingo.

Written by John Witherspoon – Need the best online bingo games? BingoStreet.com collected the best online bingo promotions and free bingo games online.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 7:52 am and is filed under Online Bingo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.