John Carpenter's The Dog
In 2003 Wrigley's had an advert for that played on the horror of waking up after a party with a mouth like the floor of a taxi cab. The Marketing People behind this one labelled the awful predicament as "dog breath", visualising it as a man retching, followed by a grumpy grey dog emerging hideously from his mouth and growling at him accusingly. It was a shocking and frankly brilliant interpretation of the feeling of the urgent need to gargle an entire bottle of mouthwash to avoid choking on one's own miasmatic tongue.

However, 540 viewers (of ... I don't know ... millions?) didn't see it this way, and complained to the ITC: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/2848249.stm

Yes, it was a bit extreme. But there was no foul language, cruelty, violence, smoking etc etc. I couldn't normally care less about adverts, but this one was impressive in its imagination. Should 540 people be able to influence what millions can and cannot view? Apparently so. But, if (in this case) I could have recruited 540 other people to counter complain to the ITC (or OfCom now) about removing a challenging but creatively inspired advert and insisting on a full reinstatement ... no, of course not. They wouldn't have.

This isn't about authoritative censorship ... I'm guessing that, had no one complained, the advert would have run it's course with no ITC involvement. It's about a tiny, tiny minority being pandered to. So if it happens again, I might just start a recruitment drive ...
( The Vomiting Hitchhiker Mephistopheles is such a mouthful in Manhattan, Fri 16 Apr 2010, 13:45, 3 replies)

That's the one
I mentioned earlier! Great ad.....
(Purpledoris I've got afeckin' job, Fri 16 Apr 2010, 13:53, closed)

Oops!
Sorry, tried searching for duplicates, obviously failed. It was magnificent, wasn't it?
( The Vomiting Hitchhiker Mephistopheles is such a mouthful in Manhattan, Fri 16 Apr 2010, 13:55, closed)

That was indeed a great ad :)
And I'm totally with you on the complaints thing, too: sometimes stuff gets pulled because of 4 or 5 complaints... that's a very low percentage out of 60 million people, isn't it? Even if only 10% of the population watched telly it would be very low.
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Fri 16 Apr 2010, 13:59, closed)