Many people are leaving complaints on the magazine's Facebook page.
Good for them - though I can't say I'm particularly arsed about it.
Is anyone surprised Country Life have done this?
This is the third place to my knowledge where C4M has tried to place adverts - and they all show who they see as their natural constituencies.
Guido Fawkes blog has run a banner ad - take a look at any comments section and you'll see most of his readers are really nasty and scarily right-wing.
I got into a brief Twitter row with editor Paul Staines about this.
He defended his actions by tweeting; "It is an advert by pro-marriage Christians. Not homophobic. I ran adverts for Ken Livingstone. Advertisement <> endorsement."
When asked if he did endorse it, came the reply; "Don't know, don't care. I just count the cash and re-stock the wine cellar."
The Womens' Institute were widely praised for refusing to run an ad for C4M last month.
They used the opposite argument to Mr Fawkes; "As WI Life is the national membership magazine, any promotion of your campaign could be seen as an endorsement... to members. We do also welcome all women to the WI and this campaign could offend many of our members."
Good for them.
The WI are often caricatured as being hilariously Middle England, and I guess C4M may have thought they'd be a shoo-in.
It's instructive and satisfying that that is no longer the case.
And Country Life?
It's the inhouse magazine of Upper England.
Though I can't pretend to read it every week, it's essentially a series of adverts for multi-million pound houses, broken up with advertorial about multi-million pound houses - note the cover above shows Country Life's idea of a smaller country house.
Plus there's a few pictures of posh totty debs, and some doubtlessly positively gripping articles about hunting, shooting,
Of course Country Life ran the ad!
What do you expect from the Coalition 4 Inbreeding?
Update: Email from Julia Dawson, Complaints Executive, Advertising Standards Authority, on Tuesday, saying the ASA are to investigate complaints that the "70%" claim on the C4M ads is misleading...
Someone calling himself GuidoFawkes has been arguing against gay marriage on the Guardian comment pages, but perhaps that's a different faux libertarian Tory troll.
ReplyDeleteCrap.
DeleteWhy are they giving him space?
Ha, they don't really. He signs in to comment on articles all "disgusted of tunbridge wells" like the other proles
DeleteP Staines is a grotesquely obese homophobic turd. I've called him out a couple of times on his pretentiously named Guido Fawkes blog about the relentless and vicious homophobia of his witless followers, to no avail. I can only assume he endorses their comments and is therefore a rancid homophobe himself.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree - awful man.
ReplyDelete