UK ASA bans Call of Duty Black Ops 7 ad over sexual-violence trivialisation

UK advertising regulators have banned a Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 video ad for “trivialising sexual violence.”

The Evening Standard reports that the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld nine complaints about a Video on Demand and YouTube ad seen in November. The spot depicts an airport security screening escalating into humiliating, sexually suggestive coercion. A male officer tells a traveller he has been “randomly selected to be manhandled,” orders him to strip “everything but the shoes,” and a female officer dons gloves. The final line—“Bite down on this, she’s going in dry”—lands the joke.

Activision Blizzard UK, trading as Call of Duty, argued the ad was for an 18-rated game and targeted at adults “who had a higher tolerance for irreverent or exaggerated humour,” according to the Standard. The company also said the ad had been cleared by Clearcast with an “ex-kids” timing restriction, and was not placed in or around children’s programming or content likely to appeal to under-16s.

The ASA didn’t dispute that the ad aimed for humour. It accepted that viewers would understand the scenario as exaggerated and “at odds with a genuine airport security screening.” But it concluded the humour was generated by “humiliation and implied threat of painful, non-consensual penetration,” an act associated with sexual violence. It also pointed to the officers’ joking demeanour and a line (“Time for the puppet show”) that the regulator interpreted as a reference to an intrusive body-cavity search.

On that basis, the ASA ruled the ad “trivialised sexual violence” and was therefore “irresponsible and offensive,” ordering it not to appear again in its current form.

The question is not whether the ad is crude—it is—but the standard being applied. “Harm” and “offence” are elastic concepts, and the process is inherently discretionary: a small number of complaints can trigger a ban, while the advertiser’s main defence becomes proof of compliance choreography (Clearcast approval, placement restrictions, audience targeting) rather than any principled argument about speech.

Culture policy increasingly works not through explicit censorship laws, but through administrative judgments about what is “socially responsible,” enforced by gatekeepers and risk-averse platforms. It is regulation by vibes—predictable only in one respect: it expands until advertisers learn that the safest creative choice is not to say anything interesting at all.