ASA August Round-up

With the European heatwave breaking headlines across the continent, the ASA has been SIZZLING up a whopping 34 rulings this month! The UK’s advertising regulator has well and truly turned up the heat on companies caught violating the CAP Code! Here’s a short and sweet roundup of my top 4 ASA rulings from the month! 

 

1. A Pirate’s Grog Rum’s paid-for Facebook Ad was thrown overboard by the ASA for implying that drinking alcohol could help overcome problems in life such as mental health concerns and had therapeutic qualities. The Ad, seen in June 2023, showed rum being poured into a glass with the caption “Pirates drink because it’s hard to find a reliable therapist on the open seas, and rum is cheaper than a shipful of parrots with good listening skills”. In upholding their ruling the ASA reiterated that marketing communications must not imply that alcohol may take priority in life or can overcome loneliness, boredom or other problems and should not imply that alcohol has therapeutic qualities.  Who RUMS the advertising world? The ASA 😉
2. A Princes Foods promotion that offered consumers a chance to win 250 Tesco gift vouchers valued at £500 each by purchasing Napolina products went ROYALLY wrong when only 1 voucher was won! The mechanic was seemly simple, buy any Napolina product from Tesco, scan a QR code and enter your details on a website to find out instantly if you had won. 

 

Princes Foods selected the winners using a computer-generated algorithm based on the number of products eligible for the promotion. With 1,605,000 eligible products and 250 prizes, the chances of winning were 1 in 6420. As a result of the algorithm and having only 5404 entries, only one winner was chosen. 

 

The ASA said when running on-pack promotions like this the Promoter needs to ensure the consumer understands the true chances of winning and that the chance of winning could be determined by factors such as an algorithm or the number of entrants. The point of sale marketing communications and all promotional material should have included information about the algorithm, chances of winning and the fact that some prizes may not be awarded as all of these details were significant and could have influenced a consumer’s decision to enter. The Ads together significantly exaggerated the likelihood of winning a prize when in reality the chances were so very small! 

 

A few BONAPARTE takeaways from this include: 

• “chance to win” and “available to be won” are not enough to make a consumer aware that not all prizes will be won. On copy phrases such as “up to XX prizes are available to be won” are preferred along with a brief explanation of how the prizes will be allocated. 
• In this situation, a wrap-up/mop-up draw could be implemented for all unwon/unclaimed prizes to avoid any prizes being left over at the end of the promotion. 
• When it comes to misleading consumers by omitting material information, the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 also applies and if you are caught breaching these laws there are hard penalties! 

 

3. The ASA threw a SERVE at Ladbrokes for publishing four tweets which included individuals that were likely to be of strong appeal to children/young persons. The tweets referenced tennis stars such as Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Nick Kyrios throughout the Australian Open 2023.   

The sportspeople featured had a significant national profile and therefore were considered high risk under the CAP guidance on “Gambling and lotteries: Protecting under 18s” in terms of how likely they were to be of strong appeal to under 18s. Furthermore, the recent tournaments the players had played in were high-profile events which would have been of interest to under-18s. Even though Ladbrokes provided evidence that the vast majority of each player’s followers on social media were over 18 and that their commercial partnerships were with adult-focused brands, this did not alter the ASA’s assessment. The only way the ads would have been acceptable would have been if they appeared in a medium where those under 18 could be entirely excluded from the audience. If those who saw the ads could be robustly age-verified as being 18+ through a marketing list validated by payment data or credit checking then this would have passed the ASA’s assessment. That’s a GAME SET MATCH on Ladbrokes!   

4. A series of complaints by Vodafone, Three UK and the public against EE for several old adverts, some of which featured Kevin Bacon, dating back to August 2020 were upheld by the ASA for being misleading. All the adverts included the claim that EE was the UK’s number-one network for 5G. The EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ruling spans 18 pages! In short, the ASA upheld some of the complaints. Most importantly they agreed that EE failed to verifiably quantify the fact that EE was the UK’s number one network. In instances where the ads included some substantiation, the information provided was insufficient or incorrectly signposted. Several ads did not provide sufficient information to allow consumers to understand the basis of the comparison between EE’s 5G network with other networks, this meant that there was no way of checking the accuracy of the claims. 

 

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