Crazy Frog punished by advertising watchdog

Ads for Jamster's ringtones – featuring the characters Crazy Frog, Sweetie the Chick and Nessie the Dragon – helped to sell 11 million ringtones, but also provoked 298 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.

Jamster is a trading name of Jamba! GmbH, a German company owned by US internet giant VeriSign, best known as the registry for all .com and .net domain names. VeriSign bought Jamba! last year for £152 million.

Eighty complainants thought they had bought the ringtone for £3, only to find that they had unwittingly signed up for a subscription service costing £3 per week. But another 244 complaints came from viewers who thought that the ads were targeting children, 33 of whom reported that their children had downloaded the ringtone and then received large phone bills.

Jamster denied that the ads were designed to target children, putting forward evidence that its customer base was largely adult. It also said that the offending ads were no longer being broadcast but that it thought its ads had made it clear that a subscription service was involved.

Jamster pointed out that once a customer had subscribed to the service, an SMS message was sent to the subscriber giving full details of costs and instructions about cancellation.

The ASA was not convinced, concluding that the ads did not make it clear that a continuing payment commitment was involved.

While it appreciated that details of the service were sent after subscription, it felt “the ads encouraged customers to subscribe and therefore should have made the nature of the service clear so customers were informed before subscribing”.

Nor did the ASA agree that the ads did not target children. According to the ruling:

“Although mobile phones are not toys, the fact that games can be played on them, photos taken, or music downloaded makes them appealing to children, other than for just making calls. We appreciated that it would be impossible for parents to control fully how their children use their mobile phones. However, ads must not take advantage of children's inexperience or their credulity and, on the basis of the complaints we received, we considered that these ads had.

“The fact that a number of complainants reported that children had run up large phone bills showed that children had been influenced. We considered that although the ads might not have been aimed at children, they were none the less of strong appeal to them and the product was clearly of interest to them. We therefore considered that a timing restriction placing the ads post 9 pm should be applied. “

Jamster is appealing the ASA ruling and had sought a High Court injunction to prevent the watchdog from publishing its adjudication until that appeal has been heard. However, earlier this week the judge, Mr Justice Lloyd-Jones, agreed that it was in the public interest to publish the adjudication now.

“This ruling sends a warning to the whole industry that ads for ringtones and other mobile phone subscription services must not appeal to under-16s,” said ASA Director General, Christopher Graham. “It also reminds the advertising business as a whole that the ASA carries out certain public law functions – and that it will be supported by the Courts.’

Phone downloads are lucrative. According to figures published yesterday by the Mintel Group, Britons will spend £740 million on phone downloads in 2005, 18 times more than the £40 million spent in 2002.

The analyst reports that ringtones currently account for the largest share of downloads, with 33% of volume sales, followed by games, which account for 26% of the market.  The remainder is made up of wallpapers/screensaves (13%), gambling (9%), music (8%) and others (11%), which includes news updates from football clubs, the Stock Exchange and other special groups.