Iceland’s Christmas advert was cute, but it still broke broadcasting rules around politics

LAST week, supermarket chain Iceland made headlines with its latest Christmas advert. The cartoon features an orangutan trashing a child’s bedroom, before taking a dark twist to show the ape’s rainforest home being destroyed for palm oil – a controversial ingredient that appears in practically every consumer item, from biscuits to beauty products.

It’s an effective, startling message, and a novel approach by Iceland to subvert the usual saccharine Christmas advertising to raise awareness about more serious issues – specifically environmentalism and animal conservation.

But that isn’t the story that’s been making headlines. The ad was banned from TV by the regulator Clearcast for being “too political”.

Cue outrage from the Twitterati. People moaned that this was an attack on free speech and argued that environmentalism isn’t political. Some even blamed the Tories for somehow being responsible for the ban. (They’re not – Clearcast has nothing to do with the government.) Celebrities have tweeted support for the ad, and a petition to overturn the ban has over 600,000 signatures.

But this outrage is misguided.

Let’s take a few steps back. First, while the ad can’t be shown on television, this is hardly an attack on free speech. It has not been “banned” – indeed, it is being shared far and wide online, and has been viewed more than three million times on Youtube.

If anything, the ban has signal-boosted Iceland’s message – people are paying far more attention to it now than if it had been broadcast.

One could even argue that Iceland anticipated Clearcast’s ruling to provoke this exact reaction, in which case it’s a PR masterstroke.

Second, the issue isn’t simply that anti-deforestation is seen as too political. TV advertising strictly prohibits political messaging, and Clearcast said that Iceland had broken a specific rule that an ad can’t be “inserted by or on behalf of a body whose objects are wholly or mainly of a political nature”.

That’s because the ad isn’t from Iceland at all, but a short film produced by the charity Greenpeace.

Plenty of people might argue that Greenpeace isn’t political. But any institution that organises campaigns and activists, lobbies politicians, and owns a boat literally called “Rainbow Warrior” has a political agenda.

More to the point, broadcast rules exist for a reason. Environmentalism may be popular across the political spectrum, and those who support it believe that they are in the right. But so do advocates of other political causes – ones that we might be less comfortable with being broadcast during prime time.

Imagine if anti-abortionists, opponents to gay rights, or indeed the anti-Muslim “crusader” Tommy Robinson were able to buy airtime to voice their messages during the middle of Emmerdale. There would be a race to the bottom as all sorts of groups bought timeslots to broadcast their views – unchallenged – into every home and onto every TV screen in the country.

The Clearcast rules may be frustrating when we support the cause, but we should be grateful that our airwaves aren’t a cesspit of political attack ads – just look at the recent US midterm elections, where candidates endorsed unimaginably vitriolic and partisan TV messaging.

Iceland’s cause is a good one – but it’s right that the ad was banned.