Posted by Sabrina B. @gametimegirl

The National Football League prodded Toyota Motor Corp to edit a television commercial, removing an image of a helmet-to-helmet tackle at a time when the effects of concussions have come under heavy scrutiny, representatives of both sides said.

The Japanese automaker, one of the largest corporate advertisers, changed the TV ad after the U.S. sports league complained and warned that the spot would not be allowed to air during its highly watched games.

The NFL’s request, a rare occurrence in the advertising world, reflected the sensitivity of the topic within the league and the lengths it will go to to protect its image and position as the country’s most popular sport.

With about $9 billion in annual revenue, the NFL would rank somewhere around No. 260 on the Fortune 500 list of America’s largest companies, ahead of such well-known names as online marketplace eBay and upscale department store operator Nordstrom.

“The NFL saw it on Monday Night Football and the next morning we got the call,” Tim Morrison, corporate marketing communications manager for the Toyota division in the United States, told Reuters. “They weren’t happy.

“I’m sure if they’d had their druthers, we’d have pulled the spot,” he added. “We weren’t pulling the spot. We couldn’t. But we never intended the spot to irritate the NFL.”

In the ad, as images of football players and brain scans flash by, Wake Forest University professors discuss the potential use of Toyota technology to help to understand and prevent brain injuries.

Viewers did not connect the tackling with the NFL, but the commercial was re-edited to remove the offending image despite grumbling by some at the automaker, Morrison said. The ad remains in rotation.

“It was just ‘please, don’t show it,’ so we just tweaked it and took the image out,” he said.

Written By Ben Klayman & Full Story here