How far can you go in an ad you’ve hidden behind links and shielded with warnings? Fallon London just found out.

Fallon does a lot of off the wall advertising for telco, Giffgaff…

So a man finding his parents having sex in the laundry is not too far left of its or Giffgaff’s centre.

The ad taps into every grown-up child’s worst nightmare involving their parents. It’s an oldie but a goodie that immediately demonstrates the idea, “At home with your parents you’re not the boss…” so that Giffgaff can promise, “…At Giffgaff we’re all the boss.”

The ad is the third version of the idea. Ad number one is sonewhat tamer.

Ad number two is more suggestion and less show also:

The text under the new video read, “Out for a run – At home with your parents you’re not the boss … Dean returns hot and sweaty from a run and gets an eye full.”

The problem is that Fallon showed the eye full – his parents having sex – rather than alluding to it.

And even though to see the video you had to go through a tweet on the company’s account, a note that read, “The situations in our new videos are, well, awkward,” the NSFW (not safe for work) hashtag, and a warning at the beginning of the video that stated, “Warning: You cannot unsee this”…

…And even after just one complaint, the Advertising Standards Authority has banned the ad:

“Although we acknowledged GiffGaff’s assertion that the ad was intended to be playful and humorous, we considered that a light-hearted tone was insufficient to mitigate the potential for offence due to the sexual nature of the content. We noted that the ad was available to view to all visitors to GiffGaff’s Twitter feed, the general content of which appeared to be of a mild nature that would have general appeal to consumers, and would play whether or not they were signed in to Twitter or the site hosting the video itself…Because the video featured strongly sexual content in an untargeted medium we concluded that it was likely to cause serious or widespread offence.”

The ASA added that the warning was “initially obscured, discreetly positioned, only present briefly” and “inadequate to alert viewers to the content”.