Moving fast to stop foul play

It’s not every day you open an e-mail to find you’re on a killer’s ‘hit list’. But that’s just what greeted some 50,000 people when they opened their in-boxes, as part of Five’s viral campaign to promote the TV crime series CSI:NY. In a second element to the campaign, 30,000 people received elaborate mailing packs which again named the recipient as an intended victim of the “Carbon Copy Killer”. The pack, which carried branding by the TV channel, announced the transmission date of the new series. However, it also contained the paraphernalia of a murder investigation: Polaroids of alleged crime scenes and rope marks on a man’s neck; a coroner’s report and psychological profiling of the ‘killer’. It was a campaign that would go on to generate nearly 200 complaints, centred on offence and distress. Many people also argued that it was far from clear that the dossier was in fact a piece of marketing. It also sparked numerous press headlines. One woman’s view that “it is such a sick thing to do ...I was reading about a maniac who was killing people with my name” was fairly typical of local press coverage throughout the UK. Whether these complaints would prove justified was, initially, a secondary consideration. The first was for the ASA to order Five to suspend the campaign, pending further investigation. Guy Parker, Director of Investigations at the ASA says: “It was clear that this frightening subject matter had the potential to alarm and cause real distress. We therefore fast-tracked our procedures and ordered an immediate halt to this campaign until we could investigate it further. In the subsequent investigation, Five said that no complaints had been received following the initial e-mail campaign. They also maintained that the mailing list they had bought for the dossier pack was compiled exclusively of people who had indicated crime programmes as a subject that caught their interest. We upheld the complaints we had received, both that the campaign was offensive and distressing, and that it was not sufficiently clear that the mailing packs were merely a piece of direct marketing. In doing so, we also sent signal to the industry at large that marketing material shouldn’t attempt to masquerade as something it is not.