ArrDee’s Spiced Rum Ad Banned for Being #TooLit for Advertising Authority
(Photo: Litty Liquor)
The UK’s Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) banned a series of advertisements from Brighton-born rapper ArrDee’s liquor brand Litty Liquor. Three Instagram posts were found to violate the alcohol advertising rules in the UK.
Music artist ArrDee is an avid rum drinker and was disappointed with the products currently on the market. This led to the creation of his own liquor brand, Litty Liquor, and its first product Spiced Rum 4Realli.
The ASA received complaints regarding three of Litty Liquor’s Instagram posts, published in Dec. 2022. The social media post were considered to be in violation of the Cap Code for featuring ArrDee because he appears to be under 25. In fact, ArrDee is currently 20 years old.
The complaint also alleged the advertisements encouraged excessive or irresponsible drinking.
Two of the posts featured ArrDee posing in front of a tower of spiced rum. While in a third post, ArrDee is shown on a video set in a nightclub.
The video starts with the rapper trying and being unhappy with two unidentified rum brands before cutting to him inside a distillery mixing up his own rum. When the video cuts back to the nightclub with ArrDee dancing with others. The video ends with a box of Litty Liquor’s products being shown and text on the scene reading #GETLIT.
All of the advertisements mentioned have since been removed and Litty Liquor accepted it breached the rules when featuring ArrDee who is younger than 25 years old. The brand indicated that the phrase “get lit” was not intended to promote irresponsible or excessive drinking.
The ASA said, “We understood that the word ‘lit’ had a long history of being used as a slang term for being drunk, and that it had also become popular within the rap music scene to indicate being intoxicated.
“We noted that in recent years the term ‘lit’ had also been used in rap music to mean that something was exciting, or of an excellent quality.
“However, because the ad was focused on the creation and consumption of an alcoholic drink, and was set in a nightclub and a distillery, we considered that consumers would likely associate the phrase “#GETLIT” … to relate to the consumption of alcohol, and becoming intoxicated.
“We therefore considered that the ad was likely to encourage excessive consumption of alcohol.
“While we welcomed Litty Liquor’s removal of the ad, we concluded that the ad was irresponsible because it encouraged excessive drinking, and breached the code.”
The Spiced Rum 4Realli was launched in December and is the first in a line of alcoholic beverages to be produced by Litty Liquor.
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