The Advertising Standards Authority are a bunch of jobsworths, banning a poster campaign featuring the tagline “Take Courage, my friend” advertising Courage beer. Why because Three members of the public believed the poster implied that the beer would give the man confidence to either make negative comments on the woman’s appearance or take advantage of her. We

The Advertising Standards Authority exists, in its own words, "to stop misleading, harmful or offensive advertising". This poster - advertising Angelina Jolie's latest film, Wanted - has been banned by the ASA because eighteen people complained. EIGHTEEN! In a free society I do wonder why we need an Elizabethan or Victorian censor like the ASA. Why can people not be treated as adults? I can u...

Picked up a lovely old Shell Oil advertising poster today. Promise to share when next I'm near a scannerLoL site feed

Transport for London has a history of filling what would otherwise be commercial advertising space with some artwork posters, for the edification or social engineering and control of its captive audience of travellers. This one by Anna Barribal is either ironic or sinister, given the mass surveillance systems and the crowds of people, to which the viewers of these posters will be exposed to on Tra...

The Brand Ireland blog has a poster of Tory campaign that never was... Lord Mandelson as Mary Antoinette... The poster, the blog claims, was produced by a French owned advertising agency was binned before it ever saw the light of day... Not sure they bottled it so much as the messaging underneath was probably unsustainable given one particularly memorable C...

The feature on political advertising in the Independent on Sunday is both a fun and insightful read.  The party political poster mock-ups (which you can cycle through here) have been put together by some of the country's leading Mad Men; so they're a fairly good indication of the themes and images that the parties might deploy come general election time. To my eyes, they also demons...

Following our election special poster and virtual poster editions, time to round off the campaign with the human poster:

We didn’t have time to tell you about the new poster from the Tories because we were too busy making a spoof of it. Unlike David Cameron’s poster, however, ours is based on the Tory’s real policy on Inheritance Tax. Even Cameron seems unsure of the merits of this poster campaign, showing it at only

I hate advertising. It inculcates pointless desires in people, encouraging them to buy crap they don’t need. This in itself would probably be no great disadvantage, but for me advertising becomes troubling when you take note of the status-anxiety and unhappiness that is fostered in people (especially women, heavily targeted by e.g. cosmetics advertising) who come to believe that they cannot ...

The Paris Metro have taken French absurdist art to a new level. They have deleted a Pipe from a famous Jacques Tati poster due to a ban on advertising smoking. The Times blogger Charles Bremner says: The Paris transport authority has made a fool of itself by doctoring an innocent poster featuring Jacques Tati, the late film-maker and actor who played the beloved eccentric Monsieur Hulot. Tati has ...