Out-Law News 2 min. read
21 Jul 2011, 2:31 pm
The advert was likely to lead customers of TalkTalk's competitors to think that they would definitely save more than £140 by switching their phone and broadband services to TalkTalk, the ASA said. This overstated the benefits of switching provider and broke broadcast advertising rules, the advertising regulator said.
"The ad exaggerated the savings that customers to whom the ad was addressed were likely to achieve and was misleading," ASA said in a ruling. "The ad must not be shown again in its current form."
Under the rules set out in the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (BCAP) Code, broadcast adverts must not mislead customers by exaggerating "the capability or performance of a product or service" and any claims made by the advert must be capable of being objectively verified.
The ASA said TalkTalk had broken BCAP rules by making misleading, exaggerated and unsubstantiated of claims in its advert.
TalkTalk's advert referred to research conducted by ICM. The adverts displayed text that said the market researchers had surveyed how much money new TalkTalk customers had spent monthly with previous suppliers and compared it to the average TalkTalk monthly bill for equivalent services the company operated, according to the ruling.
Rival telecoms provider BT had complained that the advert was misleading because it exaggerated the savings competitors' customers could make by switching to TalkTalk.
BT had argued that the advert was targeted at competitors' customers despite the fact the claims made by TalkTalk were based on savings made by its existing customers, the ruling said.
TalkTalk had argued that the text and voiceover on the advert relayed the results of its survey and did not claim to compare prices with competitors.
The ASA said that the survey results did not support claims TalkTalk had made in its advert that rivals' customers could definitely save more than £140 by switching to its services.
"We did not consider that that methodology was sufficiently robust to support a savings claim because customers who had switched to TalkTalk were more likely to have done so if they were going to make a saving, and the survey results were therefore unlikely to include data for customers for whom a switch would result in either no saving at all or only a small saving," the ASA said in its ruling.
"We therefore considered that the survey results could not show that customers of other providers would definitely make a substantial saving if they also switched," the ASA said.
TalkTalk had said that its use of question marks around text that said 'Save over £140' proved that customers would interpret the advert as showing they could save that amount with the company but not that they definitely would. The ASA said that viewers could easily overlook the question marks as they only appeared briefly in the ad.
"We disagreed that the question marks surrounding the onscreen text 'SAVE OVER £140' made this clear as they appeared only briefly and could easily have been overlooked," the ASA said in its ruling.
"We considered that the claims 'Save over £140' and '... join our customers who are already saving an average of over 140 pounds a year' would be interpreted by viewers as a whole-bill savings claims and that by switching to TalkTalk, like those customers who had already switched, they too would make a substantial saving," the ASA said in its ruling.
"We considered that such a claim would need to be substantiated with a comprehensive, robust set of comparisons which showed that TalkTalk’s phone and broadband tariffs were lower than those of their competitors," the ASA said.
"Although it had not been TalkTalk's intention to make such a claim, we considered that the survey results were not sufficiently robust to support the likely interpretation of the definite savings claim made in the ad," the ASA said.
