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When the billboard went up across London, its creators at agency BBH knew it would provoke a strong reaction. The bold line read, “Cancer won’t be the last thing that f*cks me,” across a close-up image of a woman’s naked torso.
The ad was part of a campaign from nonprofit GirlvsCancer addressing stigma surrounding cancer and female sexuality. Within three months of its release, the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned the ad, deeming it “likely to cause serious and widespread offense.”
The ASA’s ruling may not have come as a total surprise after the campaign stirred debate on social media. But Helen Rhodes, executive creative director of BBH London, countered: “We never set out to cause offense. This was for the community.”
“Interestingly, a lot of the negative comments were from men, who weren’t the focus of the campaign. The women who faced those issues found it incredibly empowering,” Rhodes told ADWEEK. “It seems that women’s issues in advertising are still a taboo. There are a lot of double standards here.”
Rhodes’ comment echoes an observation made about another ad that was banned around the same time as GirlvsCancer’s campaign. This one was from Calvin Klein, featuring singer-songwriter FKA Twigs in a black and white image with a shirt draped around her nude body. The ASA ruled that it depicted her as a “stereotypical sexual object”—yet another Calvin Klein ad portraying a partly unclothed Jeremy Allen White was not banned.
FKA Twigs argued that she actually found Calvin Klein’s image of her empowering. “In light of reviewing other campaigns past and current of this nature, I can’t help but feel there are some double standards here,” she wrote on Instagram.
