(No longer) too blue for Orange

Telephony giant Orange is soon to start an online balloon race across 1500+ websites. Quickrelease.tv was signed up for the promo via a viral video marketing agency but then this email arrived:

“We’re sorry, but we’ve taken a look at your site and we can’t use it in the race…your site has something rude or naughty on it.”

This caused a big double-take. Rude? Naughty? Quickrelease.tv? Surely there’s been some sort of mistake?

Hmm, but on the day in question, the Orange researchers obviously landed on this story. The pic of three blokes in Lycra skin-shorts is obviously too much for Orange. The shorts, you see, are red…and kinda revealing.

Fair enough…except that one of the other sites signed up for the race is The Sun Online, a racy site full of pix of semi-clad young women.

So, how come an innocent pic of three, ahem, Poles is deemed “rude” but a site with pix of naked women is fair game?

UPDATE: Ah, the power of the internet. A couple of hours after this story went online I got an OK from Poke London, the clever and rather snazzy digital agency - with fab toilets - that’s doing the balloon race for Orange. Poke’s Mike Pearson said:

Hi Carlton

I’m one of the team that’s working on the balloon race project. As you say, it’s the three cyclists in the Sildenafil story and their enhanced peripheral blood flow that have most likely caused our moderation team to reject the site.

We have a lot of sites applying to take part and the moderation team have to make a lot of individual judgments on site content. I’ve looked at it and I’ve had a word with them, as I think they’ve been a bit too cautious in this instance.

I’ve set your site to approved, and I hope you’ll take part in hosting the race.

Yippee. The race starts soon. Go grab yourself a balloon, there are loads of prizes on offer! Click on that link or on the floating racoon (?) on the left, down there in the corner.