Three months have passed since the release of the commercial.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 ad has been banned in the UK following a decision by the local regulator ASA (Advertising Standards Authority). The agency recognized the video as «irresponsible and offensive», stating that the humor in it is based on «humiliation and the implied threat of painful, non-consensual penetration» against a man.
This refers to one of the Replacers campaign videos, which featured Hollywood actors, including Nikki Glaser and Peter Stormare.
In the video, Glaser and Stormare play airport security employees temporarily replacing real workers who are too engrossed in the game. According to the plot, during the inspection of one of the passengers, the characters behave inappropriately: Glaser's character allegedly steals a watch from the man, and Stormare's character announces that he is «randomly selected for rough handling», demanding that he take off his clothes, «everything but the shoes». Next, ambiguous remarks are made, after which a scanning device is placed in the man's mouth.
The video was broadcast before the game's release in November 2025 on Channel 5 and ITV, and was also published on YouTube. The ASA received at least nine complaints from viewers who felt that the advertisement «undermines the seriousness of sexual violence».
Activision Blizzard stated that the video was pre-approved by Clearcast and was not shown in programs intended for audiences under 16 years of age. According to the publisher, the advertisement presents a «deliberately implausible, parody situation», and the humor is supposedly based on the character's discomfort, not on the sexualization of the inspection. It was also emphasized that the inspection itself is not shown in the frame and there are no explicit images in the video.
The ASA did not accept these arguments. The regulator noted that despite the absence of direct scenes, the meaning of the joke is based precisely on humiliation and the implied threat of non-consensual penetration. As a result, the advertisement will no longer be broadcast in the UK in its current form. Given that the game has been on sale for several months, it is possible that Activision will simply curtail the campaign, leaving the videos only on YouTube.
