​I agree with the ASA banning Steven Bartlett’s Huel ads. I never thought I’d say that

The ASA has been a pain in my arse many times. However, I not only agree with this decision, but it serves to remind us of a valuable marketing lesson. Ignore all the Steven fans on LinkedIn who will undoubtedly be shaking their Huel-shakers for justice over the next few days on LinkedIn.

What Huel did shows Steven isn’t the marketing god his personal brand is positioned as. His team has fallen for the most obvious marketing trap – thinking your marketing team is the customer.

Where does my surprise at agreeing with the ASA come from?

I used to help run large booze brands for alcohol FMCGs. I shit you not, you’d get into what should be a creative review, and all the feedback was actually just ASA related.

“Is that DRINK RESPONSIBLY big enough?”

“Add a shot of someone drinking water.”

“Do they REALLY look 28?”

The risk of a large publicly traded FMCG getting caught out by the ASA, with the resulting negative PR fallout, is rather huge. This is why the Portman Group was formed, so they can all “regulate themselves” and not get caught out.

A lot of the ASA rulings are brutally nit-picky. You can search its website and probably lose an afternoon laughing at cases brought up by bitter competitors, ex-staff, or agency owners who clearly lost the pitch and can’t get over it. They are hilariously detailed.

My favorite is from a brand I used to work on, Johnnie Walker. You can watch the full ad here. A woman is enjoying a glass of Scotch on the rocks. Someone took the time to write in and complain the glass looks too full and this campaign is clearly trying to glorify drinking too much.

Not sure whether to laugh or cry at this point, the ruling was not upheld, and the ad was deemed fine because the team clarified how large the ice cubes were on the shoot: “The 50ml measure of whisky was served on the rocks over five large ice cubes, which were 3.75 cm x 3.75 cm each”.

You could be forgiven for thinking this just takes all the fun out of advertising, especially in a category regulated like alcohol. But let’s be honest – these rules are there to make it fairer and make society a better place. The best marketers really are those who respect the rules, jot down the size of the ice cubes, and still have the energy to push on and be creative. Fighting against the regression to the mean with one eye on the rules at all times.

A great example is Whyte and Mackay working with the brilliant-as-ever Mr President on its new The Woodsman campaign, featuring a pack (not sure of the plural word for beavers - gang?) of beavers. It had a uniquely distinctive, entertaining, salience-building creative idea. Showing The Woodsman is for enjoying after hard work, demonstrated by beavers building a hot tub to then enjoy a whisky in. There’s a brilliant article that details how the team made the beavers look rough AF and not appealing to kids, working closely with legal teams from the very start.

What hard-working, real marketing legends.

Hell, they deserve a whisky in a hot tub after that. They had a strategy, a creative idea to deliver against that, and they went and did the work to ensure it was fair and followed the rules. The results are the most effective whisky campaign System1 has ever tested. Shopper figures also show it doubled its market share in the 12 weeks following the ad launch.

Which brings me to why I fully agree with the ASA’s ruling against Steven Barlett’s actions.

“If you haven’t tried ZOE yet, give it a shot. It might just change your life.”

“This is Huel’s best product.”

“This is the best product that Huel have released.”

The ASA has ruled these as testimonials from a public figure and “could be misleading” because they don’t share any information about Steven’s ownership in these businesses. Misleading is putting it nicely, a sceptic (me) would argue this is using his platform to be deliberately manipulative.

Here comes the really unforgivable flaw, though: The BBC reported that both Huel and ZOE argued against the ban, saying it would be clear to customers it had a “commercial relationship” with him.

A crime higher than trying to mislead a bunch of health nuts to walk about with yellow stickers on their arms is that Huel confuses marketers with who the customer actually is. Your average punter on Instagram does not use LinkedIn. Does not read The Economist. Doesn’t listen to Diary of a CEO. They ain’t in The Groucho at 2am on a Thursday arguing about X.com, chain-smoking Lucky Strike.

They are scrolling Instagram, after driving home from work listening to Coldplay. They have seen Steven on Dragon’s Den. They know he’s a celebrity but know the square root of fuck all about him. Assuming people know what businesses he’s invested in is embarrassing.

In a funny way, I want to thank Steven. He finally motivated me to make my new favorite sign.

Read more from Andrew here. Or argue with him here.