Lynx under fire for ad aiming below belt yet again

Sydney - The '”cleans your balls'” advertisement by Lynx, which shows men how to wash a variety of sports balls, has prompted 55 complaints to the Advertising Standards Bureau.

In the advertisement, an old man asks a young woman to help him with his saggy balls after she has demonstrated how other men can clean theirs.

“'Balls. Nobody wants to play with them when they’re dirty,” the Sydney Morning Herald quoted the woman, played by actor Sophie Monk, as saying.

The ad is being broadcast on free-to-air, pay television, online and in cinemas.

Psychologist and author Michael Carr-Gregg urged radio listeners in Melbourne to boycott the brand’s products.

“'This is completely inappropriate,”' he said.

“It just adds to this shadow of pornography that our children are growing up in and I think it’s time we really got strict with them,” Carr-Gregg said.

However, the outrage was exactly what the company that paid for the advertisement and its creators hoped for, according to Mark Uncles from the University of NSW’s Australian school of business.

“'Those who condemn the ads just feed the publicity machine,” Uncles said.

“So in a sense they make the product even more exciting and help to generate an even bigger emotional response,” he said.

The feminist author and campaigner for lobby group Collective Shout Melinda Tankard Reist said the advertisement “'hit the jackpot: it’s sexist, racist and ageist'”.

Reist said she was aware it was designed to provoke outrage.

“We’re not stupid,” she told the Sun Herald.

“We understand what their tactics are but the option of silence is unacceptable,” she said.

She said her lobby group had long campaigned against Lynx and its parent company Unilever because “they are repeat corporate offenders”.

A spokesman for Unilever declined to comment. But Lynx’s senior brand manager at Unilever, Duncan Robertson, told the B&T website the product was a “maverick brand aimed at young men who like their humour sharp and edgy”.

“This campaign responds to that,” Robertson said.

Last year, Unilever’s “rules to rugby” advertisement for Lynx deodorant was banned by the bureau for objectifying women.