Share
12th November 2018
10:06am GMT
The first of the Christmas TV ads have started making an appearance but one you won’t be seeing on your screens is the new Iceland ad.
The supermarket chain’s “orangutan-friendly” ad called Rang-Tan has been banned from being aired on television for being “too political”.
The 90-second animation sees a baby orangutan showing a girl a number of trees getting ripped up, telling her, “There’s a human in my forest and I don’t know what to do. He took away my mother and I’m scared he’ll take me too.”
Iceland is campaigning against the use of palm oil in food and cosmetics, which a cause of massive deforestation in the rainforest - earlier this year they pledged to remove the product from its own-brand foods.
The ad which was “dedicated to the 25 orangutans we lose every day” was deemed “too political” by Clearcast, who is responsible for vetting ads before they’re broadcast to the public.
They said, “Clearcast and the broadcasters have to date been unable to clear this Iceland ad because we concerned that it doesn’t comply with the political rules of the BCAP [broadcast code for advertising practice] code.”
Iceland founder Malcolm Walker commented, “This was a film that Greenpeace made with a voice over by Emma Thompson.
"We got permission to use it and take off the Greenpeace logo and use it as the Iceland Christmas ad. It would have blown the John Lewis ad out of the window. It was so emotional.”
READ MORE: David Attenborough Has A New Netflix Documentary Series On The Way And It Looks Incredible
