The Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 – The Replacer “Airport Security” ad has been banned by the UK’s advertising regulator over “trivialised sexual violence.”
First uploaded to YouTube in November 2025, the ad was used to promote CoD’s latest installment at the time, later airing on ITV and Channel 5 in the UK.
According to the ruling, nine people complained that the ad made sexual violence seem trivial and questioned whether it was irresponsible and offensive.
Call of Duty Airport Security ad banned in the UK
If you haven’t seen it yet, the ad opens with a scene at an airport, where one staff member asks another, “Where are the other guys?”
The joke is that the real staff are off playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, so they’ve been replaced by stand-ins. Things take a different turn, however, when a man in a blue shirt has his watch confiscated after walking through a metal detector.
He’s then told by a male security officer that he has been “randomly selected to be manhandled” and must “face the wall.” Then, a female officer pulls on a pair of gloves and says, “Time for the puppet show!”
In another scene, the male officer presses a handheld metal detector to the man’s mouth and says, “Bite down on this, she’s going in dry.”
The ASA said viewers would likely see the ad as “exaggerated” and meant to be funny, noting that nothing explicit was shown.
However, it ruled that the joke relied on the “humiliation and implied threat of a painful, non-consensual penetration.”
Activision Blizzard pushed back, saying the ad was aimed at adults and didn’t contain sexual innuendo or violence. The company said the “bite down” line referred to discomfort, not sex, and pointed out that the man remained clothed in a public checkpoint setting.
They also said that the “Replacers” were meant to be absurd caricatures, with their incompetence forming the joke, not behaviour to copy.
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