Time Warner Cable Puts The Kibosh On This Gay Underwear Ad

In an attempt to prove that the large cable conglomerates are on their last legs, Time Warner Cable has pulled this ad for Nasty Pig men's clothing because, "the holiday spot is edgy, and we take customer complaints seriously."

According to Gawker (link below), the spot was unceremoniously pulled from the air without any warning to the company, causing a bit of a firestorm of controversy. To be fair, however, the spot was running on networks with audiences for whom the ad is clearly not intended.

Nasty Pig CEO David Lauterstein forwarded me the following emails that an account executive in TWC's Media Sales Coverage department that were sent to Tara Wolf, whose Wolf Media Inc., handled the ad buy:

From: <[email protected]>

To: Tara Wolf

Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2014 11:26 AM

Subject: Re: Nasty Pig

I've been trying to call you to explain the situation. I got feed back yesterday but it's not good.

This really got blown out of the water because we were running on networks that were not appropriate to run the spot on (Cartoon Network and TBS). It was flagged and now we're refusing any revision to the original spot and will not run the spot on any networks.

I understand this is a very delicate situation and I apologize for the way it played out. Please call me if you need any clarification.

From: <[email protected]>

To: Tara Wolf

Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2014 11:49 AM

It's the content that is the issue. If we were to use the old spot we used in November we wouldn't have a problem. But the holiday spot is edgy, and we take customer complaints seriously. I apologize again. I know this puts you in a bad spot.

When Gawker reporter Rich Juzwiak called Time Warner for a response to this whole debacle, they were appropriately corporate about it all.

"It was a call-in yes," the exec told me. He would not specify how many complaints Time Warner Cable received, or whether caving to complaints is a common practice. When I asked about whether the call or decision was homophobic, he told me, "Yeah, I don't know what you're fishing for, but it's not really the case. We had a call-in, a complaint for the commercial, which is pretty edgy and we had to pull it."

For his part, Nasty Pig CEO David Lauterstein said that the ad was intended to showcase its products and not to stir up controversy.

"I just wanted to make a commercial that represented my brand and the customers we sell to," Lauterstein said. "We never intentionally made this commercial with the thought of being banned just to get press. We gave them plenty of time to offer edits as we knew this commercial might be strong for television. You can't do stuff like this for press. That's why there's an approval process. You can't do sensational things on non-live TV. That's why they have a standards board, to prevent situations like this."

Thankfully, this whole thing seems like it's not going to be swept under the rug now.

Update: We received this statement via from a Time Warner Cable representative at 5:27 today:

Proper guidelines were not followed in this instance; we made a mistake. We are sorry and we will work with this client to make it right.

Or maybe that means it is destined for a dustbin rather than under the rug...

Via Gawker