A Call of Duty advertisement had been banned for ‘trivialising sexual violence’.
The advert for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, uploaded to YouTube in November, showed a male traveller being accosted by two guards in an airport security zone.
The female officer, played by American comedian Nikki Glaser, said she and a male agent had replaced staff who were busy playing the video game.
The male officer, portrayed by Swedish-American actor Peter Stormare, then frisked the traveller, telling him: ‘You’ve been randomly selected to be manhandled – face the wall.’
After pretending to make beeping sounds with a handheld metal detector, he thentold the man: ‘I’m gonna need you to remove your clothes, everything but the shoes.’
Then the female officer put on a pair of gloves before a final scene showed the male officer putting a hand-held metal detector in the man’s mouth saying: ‘Bite down on this, she’s going in dry.’
Stormare has appeared in Call of Duty series, playing a character called ‘The Replacer’, while Glaser portrays ‘New Replacer’ in Black Ops 7.
Swedish-American actor Peter Stormare played the male officer in the advert and has appeared in Call of Duty video games previously as ‘The Replacer’.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received nine complaints that the advert was irresponsible and offensive for trivialising sexual violence.
American comedian and actress Nikki Glaser played the female officer in the advert
Actor Peter Stormare (left) played the male officer and has featured in five Call of Duty games as ‘The Replacer’
Activision Blizzard UK Ltd, trading as Call of Duty, said the advert promoted the 18-rated Black Ops 7 video game and was therefore targeted only at adult audiences ‘who had a higher tolerance for irreverent or exaggerated humour’.
It said the advert had been approved by ad clearance agency Clearcast with an ‘ex-kids’ timing restriction and was not broadcast during or around children’s programming or content likely to appeal to under-16s.
The ASA said the advert showed a non-consensual, invasive search of a man passing through airport security.
It considered the female officer’s line ‘time for the puppet show’ to be understood as a reference to an intrusive body cavity search.
The ASA added the officer was treating the search as a source of entertainment.
‘We considered that most viewers would understand the ad was intended to be humorous because the conduct shown was exaggerated and at odds with a genuine airport security screening,’ the ASA said.
During the advert Stromare’s character tells a man to remove his clothes for a search
At the end of the advert the Swedish-American actor tells the man to ‘bite down on this, she’s going in dry’
But it noted the advert’s humour was ‘generated by the humiliation and implied threat of painful, non-consensual penetration of the man, an act associated with sexual violence’.
It also considered the officers’ ‘confident and joking demeanour presented this in a humorous manner’.
Because the advert ‘alluded to non-consensual penetration and framed it as an entertaining scenario’, the ASA said it ‘trivialised sexual violence and was therefore irresponsible and offensive’.
The ASA ruled the advert must not appear again in its current form, adding: ‘We told Activision Blizzard UK Ltd to ensure that their ads were socially responsible and did not cause serious offence, for example by trivialising sexual violence.’
