Complaint about Vodafone advertisement not upheld by ASA

Recent complaints that have been made against the mobile communications giant Vodafone have not been upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority, according to a recent report.

According to a recent report a complaint that was made against the mobile communications giant Vodafone over recent advertising has not been upheld by the Advertising Standards Agency. The advertisement stated: “Don’t get left in the dark. Unlimited Facebook on Vodafone. Make the most of now.” It then went on to show that the package offered a 500MB per month data allowance and that there was a fair use policy in place.

However, complaints were made about the advertisement by a number of consumers who thought that the word unlimited in the ad was misleading because of the restricted data allowance. Some said that this 500MB restriction severely limited the service.

In response to the complaint officials from Vodafone had stated that previously the services had been advertised as unlimited but had a 120MB download limit. Officials also stated that the data allowance was more than adequate for the majority of users with most using only a fraction of this. The company added that those that exceeded the data allowance were simply asked to reduce their usage accordingly.

One its website the ASA reported that the complaints against Vodafone had not been upheld, and its assessment read: “The ASA noted all the ads made clear that a fair-use policy applied to the service and the level at which the allowance was set. We noted the information provided by Vodafone demonstrated that only a very small proportion of their customers had exceeded the fair-use policy limited and that action was likely to be a request to moderate their usage in the first instance. We acknowledged that the vast majority of customers used only a small amount of the available allowance and concluded that the existence of a fair-use policy did not contradict the claim ‘unlimited mobile internet’.”