Ad description
A paid-for TikTok ad for air up, a water bottle company, seen on 13 February 2025, featured a man lying on a road marking of a bicycle and pretending to pedal. A voiceover said, “What the fuck, are you high? Get hydrated.” On-screen text stated, “What the f#%l? Are you hy?”. A caption stated, “Ready to Get Hy?”.
Issue
The complainant challenged whether the ad was offensive.
Response
air up GmbH said that the phrase “Are you high” was not a reference to the use of drugs. They said that the phrase was a colloquial reference to someone acting strangely or ‘out of their mind’.
They said that the use of the word “fuck” was not offensive in the context of the ad and was used as a colloquial expression of surprise and frustration.
On both of those points, air up provided various examples which they believed demonstrated the colloquial meaning of those phrases.air up said that the ad was no longer running.
Assessment
Upheld
The CAP Code stated that ads must not contain anything that was likely to cause serious or widespread offence.
The ad was a TikTok video which featured a man pretending to pedal whilst lying on top of a road marking of a bicycle. The voiceover stated, “What the fuck? Are you high?” and on-screen text stated, “What the f#%I? Are you Hy?”. We understood that the ad was targeted to a general adult audience.
We considered that consumers would understand the phrase “are you high”, in combination with the imagery used, to imply that the man was behaving out of character due to being under the influence of recreational drugs. We understood that while the use of “high” was a play on the word “hydrated”, the use of drugs was not relevant to the product. We considered that, by presenting the effects of drugs as a subject of humour and including the caption “Ready to get Hy”, the reference trivialised recreational drug use by humourising the serious psychological effects it could have on an individual.
Although we acknowledged that the word “fuck” had numerous connotations, consumer research by the ASA and other bodies showed that the use of words such as “fuck” were likely to offend to such an extent that they should not be used at all in marketing communications even if they were relevant to the product, unless very carefully targeted to an audience that was unlikely to be offended by them. We understood that was not the case for this ad.
For those reasons, we concluded that the ad was irresponsible and likely to cause serious and widespread offence.
The ad breached CAP (Edition 12) rules 1.3 (Social Responsibility) and 4.1 (Harm and Offence).
Action
The ad must not appear again in the form complained of. We told air up GmbH to ensure their ads were prepared responsibly and did not contain anything that was likely to cause serious or widespread offence by, for example, avoiding expletives and claims which trivialised recreational drug use.
