ASA upholds Virgin complaint about BT broadband ad

The Advertising Standards Authority has recently upheld one of three complaints made by Virgin Media about its rival broadband provider’s advertisements.

As two of the main rivals in the world of broadband, BT and Virgin are always trying to get one over on one another and in the latest instalment of their epic broadband battle Virgin has once again approached the Advertising Standards Authority in relation to broadband advertisements being run by BT.

Out of three complaints that have been made by Virgin Media, the ASA has upheld one. The ASA agreed with Virgin that the BT advertising campaign, which stated “most of our customers are already seeing at least three times faster speeds” and “Join now …” were misleading because it gave the impression that the next generation broadband service from BT was already available to most or even all consumers.

Another complaint from Virgin about the ads for the BT Infinity service was not upheld. In the ad, BT states that the service has ‘arrived’ but the ASA said that it was noted in the small print that coverage for the service was currently limited. The ASA said that BT had failed to use the same clarity with the ‘Join now’ ad, as this had not specified details about the limited coverage in the small print.

Another ad that was cleared by the ASA related to a 20Mbps product, which Virgin said may make people think that the product was based on fibre based technology when it wasn’t. However, the ASA said: “We noted however that text in the paragraphs above the claim explained that BT Infinity was [its] ‘new fibre optic broadband’ and that the claim at issue itself stated ‘If you can’t get BT Infinity just yet, order up to 20Mbit/s broadband instead and we’ll upgrade you to Infinity if and when it becomes available’ which we considered made clear to readers that the 20Mbit/s service referred to was not a fibre optic product.”

Source – The Register