Call of Duty ad banned by government as fans ask 'who approved this?'
Warning: This article contains discussion of sexual assault which some readers may find distressing.
It’s arguably the biggest gaming franchise around, and while Battlefield 6 made a triumphant return in 2025 to become the best-selling game in the USA, let’s not forget the might that Call of Duty brings to the table.
Being the best-selling game in the USA from 2009 until it was toppled by GTA V in 2013, the various Call of Duty entries retained the crown from 2014 until 2017, and then again from 2019 until 2022, and finally in 2024.
Away from Battlefield 6, there’s no escaping Call of Duty’s gravitational pull, but being such a Goliath of the gaming world means you’ve got a lot of eyes on you. This has got the CoDverse in a bit of trouble, with the United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority banning an advert for 2025’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. In a statement on the ASA’s website (via Game Developer), the organization explains how it upheld a complaint that the advert “trivialized sexual violence."
Advert
Although the advert is still available to view on YouTube, it was aired on services operated by Channel 5 and ITV, showing two ‘replacer’ agents taking over the jobs of people who’d rather be playing Black Ops 7.
The scene in question involves these replacers posing as airport security officers and pulling a passenger to one side to tell him that he’s been "randomly selected to be manhandled." After one officer winks at her colleague while taking drugs from the passenger’s bag and licking her teeth, she then puts on a pair of rubber gloves and tells him to strip. Saying it’s “time for the puppet show,” a post-credit scene includes the passenger being told to bite down on a metal detector because she’s “going in dry."
Clearcast is an organization that reviews adverts for broadcast in the UK, and had previously approved the Black Ops 7 promo with an ‘ex-kids’ timing restriction that would prevent it from being broadcast around programs or content that children were likely to see.
The ASA says that Clearcast approved the ad because it was a “deliberately implausible, parodic scenario that bore no resemblance to real airport security procedures."
It continued to explain: “While [Clearcast] accepted that some viewers may have found the ad to be distasteful, they felt that, on balance, it was unlikely to cause serious or widespread offense.”
Publisher Activision reiterated that Black Ops 7 was an 18-rated title, meaning that audiences should have more of a tolerance for "irreverent or exaggerated humor,” however, the ASA reportedly received nine complaints.
Among these, critics said that the commercial was trivializing sexual violence, while two maintain it was encouraging and condoning drug use.
Despite the ASA noting that most would understand the ad should be taken with a pinch of salt, it also acknowledged that the humor was “generated by the humiliation and implied threat of painful, non-consensual penetration of the man, an act associated with sexual violence."
There was plenty of backlash on Reddit, with one critic writing: "That's an advert where I'm really questioning who approved it, it's giving edgy early 00s adverts but worse somehow."
Another complained: "I saw this during an ad break in a football match in November and wondered why the hell they were making a joke about sexual assault, never mind it being broadcast at 3pm."
Due to Black Ops 7’s ad alluding to “non-consensual penetration, and framed it as an entertaining scenario,” it was deemed “irresponsible and offensive.”
The ASA concluded that the commercial had “CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 1.3 (Social responsibility) and 4.1 (Harm and offense),” meaning it can’t appear in its ‘current form’: “We told Activision Blizzard UK Ltd t/a Call of Duty to ensure that their ads were socially responsible and did not cause serious offense, for example by trivializing sexual violence.”
Elsewhere, complaints about promoting the use of drugs weren’t upheld.
f you've been affected by any of the issues in this article, you can contact The National Sexual Assault Hotline on 800.656.HOPE (4673), available 24/7. Or you can chat online via online.rainn.org