Billboard too close for comfort

"GET FLICKED" in close-together caps may be clever but the phrase is not acceptable when on a big outdoors advertising billboard.

Not when the "L" and the "I" are so close together they end up looking like "U".

The Advertising Standards Complaints Board has upheld a complaint from M. Roberts of Waikato University's Language Institute about a billboard for Hamilton rock station The Generator that said "EVERYONE ELSE CAN GET FLICKED".

The station denied the billboard ad would cause serious or widespread offence.

But the board said the close- together "L" and "I" changed the word's character from the inoffensive to the unacceptable.

- NZPA