Black Ops 7 Ad Banned in UK for Joking About Sexual Violence

An ad for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has been banned in the UK after the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) deemed that it was “irresponsible and offensive” for centring around humour that was “generated by the humiliation and the implied threat of painful, non-consensual penetration” of a man in the ad.

Spotted by the BBC, the ad in question is part of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s ‘Replacers’ ad campaign, which featured Hollywood actors like Terry Crews, Nikki Glaser, and Peter Stromare. While there are several ‘Replacers’ ads, the one that got banned depicts Glaser and Stromare’s characters as replacement airport security officers filling in for the actual officers who are too wrapped up in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 to be at work.

When a man travelling steps up for his security check, Glaser and Stromare’s characters are seen to take advantage of him, with Glaser seemingly stealing his watch, followed by Stromare stating that he had been “randomly selected to be manhandled,” before telling him that he’ll need to remove his clothes, “everything but the shoes.” Glaser’s character then follows up with “time for the puppet show,” before Stromare’s character puts a body scanning device in the man’s mouth, telling him to bite down on it because “she’s going in dry.”

Outside of the ad being available on YouTube, per the BBC’s report, the ad ran ahead of the game’s launch in November 2025 on Channel 5 and ITV, after which the ASA received at least nine complaints that the ad “trivialized sexual violence.”

For Activision Blizzard’s part, the company stated that the ad was reviewed by Clearcast before it aired, and that it wasn’t aired around programming that would have appealed to children and youth under 16. It added that the situation shown was a “deliberately implausible, parodic scenario,” that the humour referred more to the man’s discomfort, and that it did not sexualize the invasive search. The company also pointed out that the search is not shown and that the ad does not include any explicit imagery.

That didn’t fly with the ASA. While the organization acknowledged the lack of any explicit imagery, it did not come to the conclusion that the humour came from the man’s discomfort, instead concluding that it was from “the humiliation and implied threat of painful, non-consensual penetration.” The ad will not run again in the UK in its current form, though, now that Black Ops 7 has been out for the last few months, it’s worth considering that Activision may simply sunset the ad campaign altogether, only leaving them up on YouTube.

It’s worth noting that the ASA isn’t the only one that came to the conclusion that the humour was centred around the man in the ad being non-consensually penetrated in public. A quick look at the YouTube comments under the ad shows you plenty of viewers got the ‘joke,’ and several wondered what the ad even accomplished in reference to making anyone want to buy or play Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.

Losing an argument with the ASA isn’t the only thing Activision lost with regard to Black Ops 7. The latest entry in the annualized shooter series also lost to Battlefield 6 on the sales charts, both at launch and overall for 2025, when looking at the best-selling games in the US.

The game’s launch was received so poorly that the team released a statement vowing that it would no longer release back-to-back games in the same sub-series. So, no more Black Ops 6 followed by Black Ops 7 runs of back-to-back Call of Duty titles. Instead, we can expect the back and forth of a Black Ops title one year and a Modern Warfare title the next.

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