Artificial grass firm’s ‘no trimming needed’ motorway billboard ad is banned for ‘demeaning and objectifying’ women

An artificial grass company has been ordered to remove a billboard after it was found to feature ‘demeaning’ and ‘objectifying’ women.

The ad showed a woman wearing flesh-colored underwear and holding a potted plant in front of her crotch with the caption “no cutting necessary” and a wink emoji.

The poster for the Great Grass company appeared at the junction of Hollins Road and Manchester Road near the M60 motorway in Oldham.

This is the second time the company has been in trouble for its advertising tactics, after being ordered to remove a poster from a billboard at the same location two years ago.

One complainant said the latest billboard objectified and sexualised women and was offensive, harmful and irresponsible.

The poster was installed on the same billboard as the previous one, at the junction of Hollins Road and Manchester Road near the M60 motorway in Oldham.

In response, Great Grass told the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the UK’s independent advertising regulator for all media, that the ad had been running for several months and claimed they had received 47 positive responses to it.

It also suggested it had not offended most of the ‘hundreds of thousands’ of people who had seen it, as only one complaint had been received.

It added that it was wrong to assume the person in the ad was a woman, when it “could equally well have been a man or a transgender person”.

75Media, which owns the poster site, said it took the ASA’s concerns “very seriously” and would immediately remove the ad if it was found to have breached advertising rules.

The authority said those who saw the ad would interpret the image as depicting a woman, due to her slim waist, curved hips, slender arms and lack of obvious body hair, with the image of the potted plant placed over the groin area and the text would be taken as an allusion to both pruning a plant and cutting pubic hair.

It said many people would see the ad as a light-hearted reference to the low-maintenance properties of artificial grass.

But it added: ‘We felt, however, that the cut-out image of a woman in underwear, accompanied by text referring to pubic hair, had the effect of demeaning and objectifying women by using their genitals to draw attention on an unrelated product.

‘We felt that the emoji next to the text, with a wink and the tongue stuck out, contributed to the demeaning and mocking tone.

‘Because we believed the ad objectified women, we further assumed that it was likely to cause serious and widespread offense and included a gender stereotype in a way that was likely to cause harm. We concluded that the advertisement was irresponsible and violated the code.”

Great Grass MCR, based in Failsworth, Oldham, was forced to remove a billboard in November last year after the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the UK’s independent regulator for advertising in all media, ruled against it

It ruled that the advert should not appear again, adding: ‘We have instructed Great Grass to ensure that their future adverts were socially responsible and did not cause serious or widespread offence, including by displaying a harmful gender stereotype by objectifying women .’

In November 2022, Great Grass had to remove a 30-foot-long poster that boasted to customers that the turf was “perfect 365 days a year… Get laid by the best.”

The ad featured a photo of a woman wearing only a thong, with the headline “Artificial Grass Experts.”

On that occasion, the advertising watchdog ruled that it ‘objectified and stereotyped women as sexual objects’.

The company then installed a replacement sign and made fun of the people who complained, even offering customers a 10 percent discount with the note “NOT OFFENDED.”

A spokesperson for Great Grass hit back at critics who told the Manchester Evening News that it was ‘frustrating that a complaint from just one person means we have to remove the advert’.

It added: ‘Do the thoughts of hundreds of others who found it funny count for nothing? It just shows how the world is going. To pander to a few, not to the masses. Woke wins.”