Today the ASA upheld a complaint against L’Oreal against two of its current campaigns (Lancome Teint Miracle featuring Julia Roberts and  Maybelline’s The Eraser Foundation with Christy Turlington) for the over use of digital retouching.
The complainant, Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson said that images of both celebrities had been digitally manipulated and were “not representative of the results the product could achieve”. Swinson is the Co-founder of the Campaign for Body Confidence and has said that she wants to ‘tackle body image pressure by requiring advertisers to label all adverts, disclosing the extent of digital retouching of images of people’.
However, Swinson won this time due to a technicality. The complaint was upheld on the grounds of misleading advertising and exaggeration. Basically, the retouching made over claims on what the product could actually achieve. Apparently due to contractual obligations with the stars L’Oreal failed to supply the ASA with the ‘before and after’ pics that would allow them to see what affect the touch-ups had on the final images so they had no choice but to uphold the complaint. In fact, had the image been for a product not related to a visual reference (for example perfume) the ASA would have had no grounds on which to ban the ad as the retouching wouldn’t directly relate to the claims of the product.

So although not the body blow against the use of retouching that Swinson is pushing for she has gained valuable PR for her campaign. 
The whole discussion is complicated by where you draw the line – improve the lightening here a bit, get rid of a spot there, removed all wrinkles and any signs of aging here – opps gone too far.  Check out these great celebrity shots of before and after to see what can be achieved with a couple of clicks of the mouse. Bizarrely retouchers seem to dislike lower eye lids! http://sastha-knowyourledge.blogspot.com/2010/12/celebrities-before-and-after-photoshop.html

The two most talked about April fool advertising jokes yesterday featured animals. BMW with their dog electrocuting technology (http://www.bmweducation.co.uk/coFacts/linkDocs/caninerepellent.asp) and the BBC iPlayer and their flying penguins (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23qDl1aH9l4).

The penguins win it for me. Bizarrely ‘uplifting’ piece.

A friend told me about a useful tool in the fight to give up smoking – an online quit-o-meter. In the process of getting my own quit-o-meter I discovered the joy of a personalised goggle home page. I now have my quitting smoking tip of the day, word of the day & a brain tuner similar to Nintendo DS. I can also choose my own background – have gone for a soothing pastoral scene. I could also have Tesco’s deal of the day or random pictures of kittens. BBC news is un-surprisingly the most popular with over 800,000 users. It’s really easy to add more applications just by clicking on the ‘add stuff’ button. You can search by keyword or just look at the newest or most users. The latest addition is a car members gallery with new pictures of cars everyday. Currently, there doesn’t seem to be many corporate users outside of media owners and Tescos & ebay. It seems a perfect environment for advertisers who want to update their users regularly – flight deals, betting etc.

FYI – It’s been 2 weeks and 3 days, I’ve saved £97.28 and not smoked 353.77 cigarettes.