By Andrew P. Collins, The Drive | If you’ve ever heard the “1-8-7-7-KARS-4-KIDS” jingle, you’ve probably heard it a million times. In states where this car-donation charity operates, it’s been running obnoxiously repetitive singing-kids ads for decades with the intensity of a shock-and-awe military campaign. But after all those years of operation, one disgruntled donor took it to court and got a judge to kick Kars4Kids off California airwaves for practicing “an actionable strategy of deception.”
Since Kars4Kids is mostly a thing in America’s coastal states, I’ll link the jingle for those of you who are unfamiliar. (As we were discussing the issue in our newsroom this morning, my colleagues in Indiana, Missouri, Michigan, and Minnesota hadn’t heard of it.) Of course, anyone with a SiriusXM subscription has probably been subjected to the song as well.
The Kars4Kids song actually has its own website. If you really want to torture yourself, you can listen to a bunch of versions of it there.
While the song is undoubtedly annoying, that’s not why it’s been ordered off the air. As laid out in the New York Times, ABC7, and elsewhere: “Judge Gassia Apkarian of the Superior Court of California, in Orange County, found that Kars4Kids’s ads violated the state’s laws against false advertising and unfair competition.”
More specifically, the Judge didn’t like that the Kars4Kids ads have no disclosures about the organization’s religious affiliation.
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Go here to read more about this adjudged deceptive advertising tactic:
https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-a-disgruntled-man-and-his-2001-volvo-got-the-kars4kids-jingle-banned?
