Virgin rapped over misleading broadband ads

Many companies shell out huge amounts of money to fund advertising campaigns and programs in the hopes of attracting new customers and encouraging existing ones to upgrade their current subscriptions in order to boost sales and revenues. The goal of advertising is to obviously hype a firm’s services, packages, and offers–but sometimes, that’s all the ads do because the customer finds that the service is lacking or not as advertised once they do sign on to a subscription or offer. This is one of reasons why the Advertising Standards Agency had released a new set of advertising guidelines late last month for service providers to serve as both a guide and warning to broadband companies in promoting their products or services.

A complainant recently brought to the ASA’s attention two advertisements by Virgin Media that are misleading and violate the set guidelines. The first advertisement was one that was published in a computer gaming magazine last June, which described Virgin’s broadband service as one that was best for online gaming, with the following words headlining the ad: “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”.

The second advertisement that was being raised was one that read: ”Got the need for speed? Get ahead with 7x faster broadband. Game on … Outmanoeuvre with lower lag times.”

The complainant challenged these advert claims by Virgin Media, stating that they were grossly misleading as the firm’s broadband services are constantly plagued with “significant jitter,” affecting gaming performance. Virgin Media responded to the complaints by saying that the first ad was made by the editorial team of the magazine, which had not cleared the firm’s usual protocol for ads. Virgin also stated that the ad would no longer be run in future advertising campaigns.

The ASA upheld the complaint and ruled that Virgin Media can no longer run the ads in their current form. The ruling read: “The ASA noted Virgin’s comments that the ‘best for online gaming’ claims had been included in ad (a) in error and would not be included in future ads. However, we considered that in the context of an ad which included claims such as ‘So what would it be like to have the UK’s best gaming broadband? A magical connection that solved all those problems of lag, unfair deaths and connections slowed by family members using the same line?’, the overall impression given by ad (a) was the Virgin’s 50 Megabit broadband service was superior to other broadband services for gaming.”

The ruling went on to explain their decision, stating: ”We considered that consumers were likely to understand the claim ‘Outmanoeuvre with lower lag times’, made in ad (b), to mean that Virgin’s 50 Megabit broadband service was superior to other broadband services for gaming.”

Source – Yahoo! News UK