As predicted, PaddyPower has duly had a wrist-slap from the ASA over its 'guess the tranny' game, after 92 complaints were lodged (collected stuff on PaddyPower adverts here)

Hilariously PaddyPower claimed it meant no offence and rejected the claim that it reinforced negative stereotypes.

As it has pointed out before, PaddyPower asked the Beaumont Group, apparently a leading transgender group in the UK, and apparently received the thumbs-up. The reality was rather more complicated.

The ASA disagreed with virtually everything PaddyPower had to say, judging that the ad:

trivialised a complex and difficult issue and objectified in a way that was likely to cause them serious offence;

depicted... negative stereotypes in a way that was also likely to be seriously offensive to trans people;

likely to cause serious offence to women generally and trans women specifically;

was likely to cause serious offence;

trivialised a highly complex issue and depicted a number of common negative stereotypes about trans people;

irresponsibly reinforced... negative stereotypes;

condoned and encouraged harmful discriminatory behaviour and treatment;

breached BCAP Code rule 4.2 (Harm and offence);

breached BCAP Code rules 1.2 (Social responsibility).

The ad must not be shown in public again, but it's all a bit stable door and bolted horse, really. Advertisers understand this and play the system so that they can run offensive ads and reap subsequent infamy from the resulting news stories.

What does PaddyPower have up its sleeve next, I wonder?

NB. Read the full judgement here

Youtube Likes to Dislikes: 12 to 134

Here's Santander's previous effort - now deemed 'too corporate' and, presumably, 'not hideously annoying enough'. Lovely music (Wild Beasts) and a neat, slightly dreamlike visual metaphor. Loses marks for the faux-folksy 'hello' though.

Youtube Likes to Dislikes: 111 to 14

That strikes me as being an unedifying position to be in, at the whims of whatever brats are in the vicinity and requiring a spare blouse at any given time of the day, though I suspect that most women who have given birth are rather nonplussed by the idea of embarrassment at unintentional milk spillage, having had various people prod their vaginas and sew them up again after a small screaming red thing has emerged from the part of them normally reserved for their partner's penis (or turkey-baster).

Anyway, the point is that the sound of a baby screaming has unfortunate ramifications. For new mothers, surprise lactation. For absolutely everyone else, pain on a level similar to receiving anesthetic-free root-canal surgery.

The sound of a child screaming is the most awful noise known to man, worse even that the noise of Piers Morgan having a wank or Janet Street-Porter being bummed.

It's a noise designed to do something to us – as animals who got ideas above our station – on a primal level. It demands that we do something about it. You can't fight it. It's like being scared of heights; it's like wanting to have sex with beautiful members of the opposite sex; it's like being disgusted by George Osborne's face. It's built into us.

I've not made up my mind whether Dulux knows about this or not. A charitable reading is that the people who made this ad simply thought it was a clever juxtaposition. A more sinister reading suggests that the people who made this advert know exactly what they're doing; annoying the living fuck out of people in order to make a more memorable advert.

Halfords had an ad over Christmas with a young girl screaming all the way though it – and I wondered whether we'd have a raft of baby-scream ads, delivering precision-guided primal shocks to your very core.

If it is deliberate there's only way to go after this – an ultrasonic non-lethal weapon that makes people vomit up their spleens. That'd be memorable, eh?

It has columns on lots of different things: advertising, railways, TV, books, the media, politics and so on. It also runs a column on advertising, Ad Nauseam, on advertising and shenanigans in the industry. I guess it's written by someone within - or previously within - the industry because whoever writes it certainly gets something of an inside track.

I was interested to read the following about Paddy Power and its recent run of ads, clearly intending to be controversial for the Hell of it, that culminated in the Gregos Traitorelli ad. I disliked this ad because it's so obviously intended to push the envelope of what's acceptable - along with all its other recent ads.

Lots of people have been leaving lots of witless 'get a sense of humour mate' comments that shows that they can't be arsed to actually think about the issues or they're too stupid to. The issue for me is this: deliberately courting controversy by flirting with offensive issues like race, class, animal cruelty and gender issues. I find it vaguely pathetic, in the way that I find it pathetic that largely middle-class journos write inflammatory stuff in the knowledge that thick readers get off an some casual racism or homophobia with a healthy side serving of big tits.

It plays people for being stupid. It works the system (in this case what's considered acceptable in the world of advertising) simply to gain a flash of notoriety. The Gregos Traitorelli ad is flirting with race issues to make you put a ten-pound bet on Balotelli scoring a goal.

But don't just take my word for it. Read what Private Eye has to say on the subject - and ask yourself is this is all quite as innocent as you might think.

Several companies have used an advertising strategy that involves goading regulators with risque ads to receive free publicity. Other advertisers end to loathe the self-styled mavericks, because they prove that adland's cosy self-regulatory system lacks teeth, thus threatening the whole edifice.

First French Connection was the bad boy, followed by Ryanair. Now it would appear bookmaker Paddy Power is taking up the mantle.

In late 2010 it ran a TV ad featuring blind footballers kicking a cat . When that received more complaints than any other ad that year, the free publicity penny seems to have dropped. Since then the cheeky Irish pranksters have run topical ads featuring the footballer Luis Suarez after he received an eight-match ban for racial abuse; a spot entitled Lady's Day asking viewers to pick out the 'stallions' from the 'mares' at a race day; and an internet-only ad featuring a man shooting 'chavs' with a tranquiliser gun at the Cheltenham Festival.

Its latest spot features a man who placed a bet against his own team renaming himself Gregos Traitorelli, relocating to Greece and supporting a team called Athletico Kebab. You might expect this kind of stuff from Paddy Power by now, but its agency, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, should know better

There was another blog under the same heading, called Copy Cunts that I commend to you. Copy Cunts finds examples of adverts ripped off popular internet memes and presented as if new, shiny, interesting and worth a bill of £250,000.

There are a few that I'm aware of – generally any advert you think it cool – but I've not found one myself before. Before we go any further, here's Beardyman with an absolute slice of fried cocaine.

He's good innee? Innee good?

Anyway, here's something utterly awful to put you in a bad mood.

Hate it? Good. So does everyone else in the world. Especially the people who made it. To them this advert is a constant reminder that they have bequeathed something hideous to the world.

They have not made people laugh, cry, hope for a better world or see the everyday beauty in something that has become overfamiliar.

They have made some people irritated about biscuits. Well done.

EDIT: CopyCunts did this ages ago. So, ironically, I'm a Copy Cunt. Oh dear.

...this witless run of adverts where we live together like some charmless analogue of a BBC children's series from the 80s?

No. I love...

...earning a packet for whoring myself out for a series of adverts that are destined to become loathed by everyone who sees them because of their sheer ominpresence?

No (well, obviously the money bit). But largely no. I love...

...my stupid voice?

No. I love...

...this weak attempt to copy the meerkat effect by making what was once a mildy diverting nodding dog character into a carpet-bombed attempt at a tedious meme?

No. I love the time I found this decapitated Churchill dog in a car-park in Liverpool.

Oh... no, no, no, no...

If so, can I interest you in this tartan paint?

Maybe. Maybe not. Certainly shit though.

EDITED TO ADD: I've added the vids below to provide a bit of context for what plays out in the comments section. It's the deliberate courting of what's allowed - and what's acceptable to me - and what isn't in advertising in previous ads that leads me to questions PaddyPower's intentions in the Gregos Traitorelli ad.

The only sane response to this is projectile vomiting for the entire duration of the advert, with the puke flying forcibly our of mouth and nose, followed by an extended period of bleary-eyed moaning and gasping afterwards that follows any such emetic outburst.

Awful, awful, awful. And bonus turds for crimes against music: Little Things by Dave Berry in this case. Fairly twee, admittedly, but made into a non-lethal weapon through its association with these bile-inducing visuals.

What the fuck was Dawn Porter thinking when she accepted this complete No Win Scenario of a job? I mean, the £10,000 probably went some way towards helping but, really, there should be no figure in the world that should convince people to demean themselves in this way.

To watch Porter – a fairly ridiculous TV presenter who once made a programme called Dawn Gets Naked and then... didn't get naked – talking about how she wipes her exit holes is one thing.

But to see her trying to ask disinterested members of the public about their toilets rituals – and encounter a mix of disgust, disinterest and downright hostility is just absurd. Porter, no stranger to idiotic public appearances, looks embarrassed to even be there. Pretty much the best she gets out of people is that it's "not weird" to wipe your backside with a moist toilet tissue. Some dismiss the notion with something approaching revulsion.

Oh God, now she's found some frightened-looking teens on a sofa. "Hold up your Caplets – we're going to put them on Facebook," she says, in what must be the most chilling words these girls have ever heard.

Ah, Facebook. The box that must be ticked in any dim-witted media campaign. Andrex's Clean Campaign, which mainly consists of bribing people to join in with loads of low-value prizes, has 30K fans. No doubt someone in a boardroom will be waving a piece of paper that suggests that every one of them is worth £480,000 per annum. That would be total bollocks, of course, even if it weren't for the fact that having essentially 'bought' the vast majority of those fans they're essentially worthless – and they cost a bomb in the first place. What's the ROI on that? Weak, whatever it is.

Something else that winds me up is that every single instance where Andrex is mentioned has a little ® sign, to indicate that it's a registered trademark. What a sad joke. This is Facebook - who gives a fuck?

Anyway, back to Dawn. She promises that anyone logging onto Facebook will see all of her 'photos and videos'. That begs an intriguing question. We'll have to assume, for now, that the pictures and videos in question do not involve Dawn defecating and then rubbing some semi-wet conglomeration of papery fibres on her puckered anus or wet vagina.

She ends this first video inviting a load of frightened-looking women to meet her in the toilets, where she no doubt grills them as to their toilet habits. And then, just when you think it couldn't get any worse, Porter says this:

"I've got a really clean bum right now."

This must – surely – be some sort of invitation to anal sex. I literally cannot think of any other occasion where you would bother to mention this.

There's more – Dawn Porter Goes To A Hen Do. Dawn goes to the hen do of a woman she's never met and starts talking about arse-wiping. If this happened in real life you would phone the police.

She then goes and talks to some mechanics. They look deeply unimpressed. Why is no-one pulling the plug on it? Why does Porter have to keep saying to these things to people who have absolutely zero desire to talk about shitting on camera?

Where else is there for this campaign to go? Why, the toilet itself of course! Who wouldn't want to go to the toilet and then emerge to give a detailed report on camera? "I found them a bit moist at first," Dawn confides in a clearly-alarmed member of the public. "But you get over that after a few days." Dear Christ.

At the end of it all Dawn invites everyone who she's harassed over the previous few weeks to an arse-wipe party. What. The. Fuck? It's so painful, so futile and so ill-conceived the only response can be a deep, deep pity for everyone concerned.

Porter, of course, has made a career out of these stupid conceits. There was the naked one of course. Then there was one called Dawn Goes Lesbian, or something, where Dawn didn't become a lesbian and – surely – alienated everyone on the planet who's gay.

She's also to be found on the web shilling potatoes for the Potato Council in another ridiculous challenge. Perhaps that's why she needs all those Washlets. An all-potato diet must be hell on the bowels.