Who are Global Personals and what do they do?

Global Personals are a successful company run by CEO Ross Williams which runs a wide range of great on-line dating websites.  However, as well as these legitimate websites, it also chooses to run sites which are aimed specifically at married people encouraging them to have affairs.  What is even worse, these websites are advertised on high street billboards.  In this way Global Personals’ work encourages people to cheat on their partners and profits from it.  We believe that this aspect of their work is toxic.

Campaigning against the adverts for the websites they run

In January 2010, I saw one of the adverts for one of their websites Marital Affair close to where I live and I complained to the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) about it.  They rejected my complaint, saying it ‘did not offend against widely held moral or cultural standards’.  I set up a facebook group to encourage people to support my complaint to the ASA and this led to over 4000 people getting involved.  The pressure we put on the company led to the advert’s withdrawal.  You can read more about that campaign here.

However, in 2011 more adverts appeared, this time for a different website, but run by the same company and basically offering the same kind of service. 

This time we have opted for a different approach and we do not want to widely publicise the name and URL of the website and thus give it a load of publicity.  Instead we want to put our concerns directly to Global Personals and their CEO Ross Williams about the websites they run and the presence of these adverts. 

The following blog posts have been on the Resistance & Renewal website where the campaign originated from:

• Stop Poisoning our communities with your marriage break-up websites: An Open Letter to Ross Williams, CEO of Global Personals
• The price of everything…and the value of nothing
• The Sound of Silence – Global Personals’ response to our complaints
• Public Statement by Global Personals