UK’s Advertising Standards Authority bans Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 commercial for “trivializing sexual violence”

The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned a Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 commercial for trivializing sexual violence.

The Video on Demand and YouTube advertisement depicted fake airport security staff performing security checks because the real ones were “off playing the new Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.”

After a male passenger was told he had been “randomly selected to be manhandled,” a female security officer was then “shown to be licking her teeth while picking up a prescription container and shaking it, before showing it to the male officer who winked back at her.” The male was then told to strip, and advised “she’s going in dry.”

As first reported by the BBC, the ASA received nine complaints that the advertisement “trivialized sexual violence,” “generated by the humiliation and implied threat of painful, non-consensual penetration of the man.”

Although publisher Activision Blizzard argued that as the game was 18-rated, the advert was restricted to an “ex-kids” timing schedule, and the ad “depicted a deliberately implausible, parodic scenario that bore no resemblance to real airport security procedures” with a “comedic tone rather than harm or abuse,” ASA agreed with the complainants and banned the ad from running again in its current form.

Two complaints that suggested the advert encouraged or condoned drug use were not upheld as the ASA concluded that “the ad was unlikely to be understood as encouraging or condoning drug use and therefore concluded that it was not irresponsible on that basis.”

“The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Activision Blizzard UK Ltd t/a Call of Duty to ensure that their ads were socially responsible and did not cause serious offence, for example by trivialising sexual violence,” the ASA concluded.