Ikea have a great advert running in Australia at the moment.
[Agency:Three Drunk Monkeys, Sydney]
But when is it OK to use the BEEP?
A few years back, the Scott Mills show on BBC Radio 1 got into trouble with OFCOM for a feature they ran which featured supposedly rude words beeped out. In fact, they beeped out perfectly clean words, but by beeping them out, made the audio sound filthy.
A listener complained about an item called “Badly Bleeped TV” – a regular feature in this radio programme, in which extracts from TV or radio are played with words ‘bleeped’ out. The words themselves are later revealed as being not offensive. However, the remaining beginning and ending sounds of the words give the impression that the ‘bleep’ is masking an offensive word, or create the beginning and end sound of an offensive word on either side of the ‘bleep’.
At Capital when BAM BAM had a (annoyingly short lived) show, we were tasked with creating some imaging that launched his show. It was created by my former colleague Arden Hanley and it featured the 6 year old son of our then marketing director saying lots of words that sounded like he was swearing. But the piece talked about the fact that BAM BAM had a beeping machine – precisely to stop people swearing. [If anyone has a recording -let me know – I’d love to share it here too].
Maybe the Aussies are just a little more laid back about this sort of thing??
JAMES STODD 