The Konservative party plans to file an injunction against the adultery-based dating website Victoria Milan for using its party head, Lars Barfoed, in an advertising campaign.
Barfoed hasn’t commented the issue yet, but his spokesperson, Benny Damsgaard, said that the party is taking legal action to forbid Victoria Milan from using Barfoed in its advertising material.
“This is a simple case of abuse and we have asked our lawyer to get it stopped,” Damsgaard told BT tabloid. “Aside from that, we have no further statement.”
'Don't end up in bare feet'
Victoria Milan, which describes itself as the "original discrete social network for men and women who are looking for a secret affair”, used Barfoed in its campaign because the former justice minister's infidelity led to his wife seeking a divorce earlier this year.
The advert in question portrays a photo of Barfoed accompanied by the text: “100% diskretion garanteret! Så du ikke ender på bar foed!” (”100 percent discretion guaranteed…so you don’t end up in bare feet”).
Jan Trzaskowski, an associate professor of marketing law at Copenhagen Business School, said that the advert is illegal because Barfoed has not agreed to participate in it.
“It’s a breech of decent marketing ethics. It’s a pretty clear case and it’s illegal,” Trzaskowski told metroXpress newspaper.
A worthwhile risk
But Victoria Milan said that using Barfoed was a risk that it was willing to take and that it had hoped that Barfoed would react well to the advert.
“We want to show, in a humorous way, that having an affair is not just about cheating, but mostly about not being caught,” Sigurd Vedal, the founder and head of Victoria Milan, said in a press release. “The Barfoed story shows that if you are not careful you could end up divorcing and being in a difficult situation.”
It’s not the first time that the dating bureau has ruffled feathers. The company has been forced to remove adverts before, including campaigns that featured members of the royal families in Belgium and the Netherlands.
The Victoria Milan website was launched in 2010 as the first site of its kind in Europe and already has over three million members worldwide, including 245,000 in Denmark.
