Around four year old Madeleine McCann, went missing from her family’s holiday apartment in Portugal in 2007, was featured in the advert for a burger van with her mother.
Advertisement for a burger van that featured pictures of Madeleine McCann have been banned for being offensive.
Adverts for the Otley Burger Company, ran over Mother’s Day, showed the missing girl and her mother, Kate McCann, with the caption, “With burgers this good, you’ll leave your kids at home. What’s the worst that could happen?”
The promotional images were posted on company’s social media handles and were then reported to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
Three complaints were filed to the regulatory body, all were saying the ads were likely to cause distress and serious or widespread offence.
The ASA said “it considered the nature of the content to be so concerning that it asked Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to remove the posts and suspend the account pending its investigation.”
While responding to the complaints, the Leeds-based takeaway said all the ads had been removed and would not appear again.
But, it was still available to view on Facebook on Wednesday morning.
Madeleine was almost four when she went missing from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, on Portugal’s Algarve, on 3 May 2007.
Her disappearance bought shockwaves around the world and is still widely known, which the ASA said meant the images used in the ad would be “instantly recognizable to many people”.
Authority said, “We further considered that any reference to a missing child was likely to be distressing and that in the context of an ad promoting a burger company the distress caused was unjustified,”
It remained to say the image of a man running away with a superimposed photo of Madeleine “trivialized the circumstances” around her disappearance and “made light of a distressing news story”.
