BT gets slated over broadband advert

Communications giant BT has been slated over the claims that it has used in an advertisement, and this follows a complaint lodged by Virgin Media.

A complaint that was recently lodged by communications giant Virgin Media against main rival BT has been upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority. The complaint related to advertisements for BT’s Total Broadband service, which have been run in both national and regional press.

In the advertisement BT was claiming: “Back to Back. We’ve been named Best Performing Broadband, again. For the second year in a row, an independent survey has named BT Total Broadband as the best performing ADSL provider.” Officials from BT said that this claim was based on an independent survey by Epitiro.

However, Virgin complained because the advertisement did not make it clear that the Epitiro tests were amongst ADSL providers only and not amongst cable providers. BT said that it did not include the term ADSL in its advertisement because it may have been too difficult for some people to understand, but the ASA did not accept this explanation.

The ASA stated: “Although we accepted that some readers would not be familiar with the term, we considered that most would understand ADSL to be a mode of broadband delivery. We welcomed BTs assurance that they would amend future advertising so that claims were always immediately qualified by the term ‘ADSL’ if the claim was specific to ADSL.”

It went on to state: “Nevertheless, we considered that the headline claim “We’ve been named Best Performing Broadband, again” did not make clear that the claim was specific to ADSL broadband. We concluded that, without immediate qualification, the ad was likely to mislead.”

Virgin had also complained that the advertisement failed to make it clear that a phone line would be needed for this service, but the ASA said that this would be clear to most consumers and so did not uphold this part of the complaint.