Media regulators have dismissed consumer complaints about adverts for Budget Direct and Bingle, and the insurers will not be taking their campaigns off the air. 

Some complainants say a Budget Direct advert, which shows a character called Captain Risky diving into shallow water and driving a car off a tall ramp, may encourage children to perform dangerous stunts.

Others say the Bingle promotion, which features a computer-generated chimpanzee skydiving while blindfolded and then driving, promotes animal cruelty. 

Bingle, part of the Suncorp group, says there are no plans to change the campaign and the insurer does not “consider that any offence is genuinely warranted”. Spokesman Marcela Balart told insuranceNEWS.com.au some people believe the chimp is real. 

“We have made it clear this is not the case and that ‘Joni’ is a 100% computer-generated image creation. No chimps were used or harmed in the making of this commercial. The only animal exposed to risk in this ad was the motion capture actor.”

The Advertising Standards Board has dismissed the complaints against Bingle, noting the promotion is “clearly fantastical and unrealistic and that most reasonable members of the community would recognise that it is not a real chimp parachuting or driving a motor vehicle”.

Budget Direct says its Captain Risky campaign is “clearly targeted at adults” and “uses humour and exaggerated situations… the target audience would easily comprehend”.

“No children are depicted in the advert, children are clearly not being targeted as potential insurance customers and the advert is not scheduled to air in any children’s programs,” the company says. 

It says it is clear the advertisement does not depict the real world and presents “a form of visual puffery and comedy”.

The Advertising Standards Board has dismissed the complaints. “Most of the stunts would not be able to be performed by a child, because they involve vehicles or equipment not easily or readily available to a child (a jet-pack),” it says.