A life insurance company's ad for funeral cover denigrated cardboard coffins, the Advertising Standards Authority says.
Pinnacle Life advertised its policy on radio.
"In the time it takes for your family to scrape up enough money to buy a cardboard coffin for your funeral and have it collapse in the rain, as it's been taken out to the ute/hearse, you could have sorted out $20,000 worth of funeral cover," said the ad.
D Lockhart, a supplier to the industry, complained the ad was "incredibly misleading" in that it implied cardboard was a cheap, undesirable and unstable option.
As well as being desirable environmentally, cardboard caskets from D Lockhart's company were designed to withstand weather, chillers and embalming fluids as people would expect from a functional coffin, the ASA's complaints board was told.
Pinnacle Life said the ad was meant to be a humorous caricature of a less than desirable funeral and not intended to be untruthful or to denigrate any product.
But the complaints board said the humour did not save the ad from breaching its code of ethics.
In upholding the complaint, it said the reference to cardboard coffins collapsing in the rain was a deliberate comment "that denigrated this type of coffin and strongly suggested that they were an inferior product."
