The redacted black bar, that familiar symbol of government suppression and official secrecy, has found a new home: the marketing department.

Heinz and Levi's have both recently deployed the visual vocabulary of censorship in campaigns responding to regulatory limitations — in their case, FIFA's rules about "clean" environments at World Cup venues. The approach positions the brands as plucky speakers of inconvenient truths, muzzled by distant authorities. It is, in the current parlance, a clapback.

Jonathan Hardy, a professor of communications and media at the London College of Communication who has published extensively on censorship and misinformation, told The Drum that he views such campaigns with a mixture of admiration and suspicion.

"I have some admiration. I even have some sympathy," Mr. Hardy said of the World Cup work. "It works partly because it can tap into this wider disquiet about FIFA as an organization setting terms that affect how much people pay to enjoy the World Cup."

But the Heinz campaign, he added, operates in "bad faith, surely." The regulations the company is ostensibly protesting — FIFA's exclusivity rules for partner brands — exist to protect exactly the kind of marketing arrangements that Heinz itself participates in elsewhere. (One imagines the company would be less charmed by guerrilla ketchup brands setting up shop around its ITV Weather sponsorship.)

"Selectivity and censorship, including the kind some of these brands are complaining about, is quite intrinsic to marketing, as is deal-making," Mr. Hardy said.

The professor drew a distinction between brands appropriating the aesthetics of censorship for promotional effect and those using their platforms to highlight genuine concerns — citing a 2014 campaign from TBWA\Istanbul for Radikal Newspaper, in which news stories literally faded from the page over four hours.

What concerns Mr. Hardy is the blurring of paid communication with the forms of public discourse. "What we have to call out is: that's still an ad," he said. "You haven't set out the case. This isn't a courtroom."

He offered a question for brands tempted by the David-versus-Goliath framing: "Who's David and who's Goliath?"

It is a question that, in the advertising industry, has rarely produced a comfortable answer.

Original story published in The Drum: "How the language of censorship became advertising’s latest trope | The Drum"