The Home Office, the radio advert and the porn links

The Home Office has received a telling-off from the Advertising Standards Authority, for failing to spell out the URL of a campaign website in a radio commercial. The ASA has ruled that ‘the ad should not be broadcast again in its current form’ – but it’s a bit much to say, as the BBC does, that the ad has been banned.
The domain thinkuknow.co.uk was registered by the Home Office as far back as 8 November 2001. It was relaunched in January this year, as promoted on the Home Office website itself. The follow-up publicity campaign, which ran on 96 Trent FM in March this year, told listeners:

What you say online isn’t always what a paedophile hears. Giving out personal info could let a paedophile track you down. Be smart online, be safe offline. Visit thinkuknow.co.uk

All well and good. But they didn’t say that it was the letter ‘u’ in the middle, rather than the word ‘y-o-u’. And even though txt msging has ruined the young generation’s grasp of English, I’d still say people would be more likely to type in ‘you’.
The domain thinkyouknow.co.uk was registered as recently as 15 February 2006 – note, a couple of weeks after the relaunch – by one Chris Fox trading as Liquid Names, with an address in Spalding, Lincolnshire (although it looks like he tried to sell the house in question on eBay in April). The domain is currently ‘parked’, and if you go there, you’ll see a page of ‘sponsored links’ – in other words, adverts generating revenue for the owner.
The ASA received only one complaint, from a woman who said the thinkyouknow.co.uk site ‘contained links to websites of an adult nature including pornography websites’. In their defence, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (who have since taken ownership of the website) say that:

the inappropriate material on the other website was at least four clicks away from the homepage, and CEOP believed that any user would be aware, by that point, that it was not a site about child protection on the internet.

which seems a fair point. In fact, on virtually any page on the internet, you’re probably just four clicks away from ‘inappropriate material’. (Tip: don’t test this theory during office hours.)
My take on this? It’s right that the Home Office should get a slap on the wrist for this… not for pointing to pornography (which is really pushing it a bit), but because they should never have used a URL which could so easily be misheard, without spending the couple of quid necessary to purchase the erroneous alternate. Bear in mind, they had four and a half years to do so.
(Update: I’m wondering if they maybe used to own the domain, but let it lapse? There are over 100 references to thinkyouknow in Google, from what you would consider authoritative and reliable sources, including the BBC, Hansard, Oftel/Ofcom, various police forces, BT, and – inevitably – at least one Home Office website.)
Of course, all this free publicity for the thinkuknow site can’t be bad. Er, just a minute… they didn’t engineer this, did they? After all, the whole premise of the complaint is that the misguided listener ended up on a page which she took to be something it actually wasn’t. Which seems to be the whole point of the campaign… 😉