Here’s a sound that draws a crowd

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In cartoons, the Road Runner goes “Beep, beep”. On Madison Avenue, the popular onomatopoeia is pronounced “Bleep, bleep”.

Advertisers are winking at the contentious issue of content regulation by using bleeping sounds in commercials and video clips. The bleeps mimic how television and radio obscure bad language in live news coverage or taped reality shows.

Many times, the bleeps heard in commercials are covering actual expletives, which are written into the scripts solely to be censored. For instance, in a commercial for the New York Film Academy, a crude word spoken by the filmmaker Brett Ratner is bleeped.

“We were playing poker and he lost and I said, ‘Instead of giving me money, why not do a commercial for me?’” said Jerry Sherlock, director of the academy. “So we made it into a whole joke.”

In a video clip for Bud Light, titled “Swear Jar”, that appears on the bud.tv website and sites like YouTube, cast members curse a blue streak.

The plot spoofs a demand for linguistic purity in a large office. When employees learn that the quarters deposited into the jar will go toward buying beer, the four-, seven- and 12-letter words fly freely. The video was created by the Chicago office of DDB Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group.

“We’ve had about 12 million viral views of it that we can track,” said Robert C Lachky, executive vice-president for global industry and creative development for Anheuser-Busch in St Louis, the brewer of Bud Light, “and 2.7 million have been on YouTube alone.”

Sometimes, there is nothing blue or objectionable about the words being hidden. Rather, consumers are being encouraged to jump to the conclusion that they are being protected from something crude.

That was the case with commercials for McDonald’s franchisees in metropolitan New York, which promoted a giveaway of items on the chain’s Dollar Menu.

A four-letter word—free—was bleeped in the spots to help make a point that the promotion was, as one character put it, “so good, it’s obscene.” The commercials were created by Arnold Worldwide, part of the Arnold Worldwide Partners division of Havas.

As a device to draw the attention of a bored or distracted audience, bleeps are an updated version of tried and true tactics like loud sound effects or laugh tracks.