Not as easy as it may seem
I have been asked by many clients what they’ll need to do if they make claims about their product/service or the price in their advertising.
The advertising codes, administered by the Advertising Standards Authority state:
3.7
Before distributing or submitting a marketing communication for publication, marketers must hold documentary evidence to prove claims that consumers are likely to regard as objective and that are capable of objective substantiation. The ASA may regard claims as misleading in the absence of adequate substantiation.
What this means is, if you make a claim in your adverts, you need to have the evidence to back those claims up.
If a complaint is made to the ASA, they will ask for the evidence you have to support your claims, and this may need to be extensive.
Unfortunately, the answer I have for my clients is not black and white, as it will depend on the product/service and the claims you are making.
To try and give some help in answering this question, let’s look at a recent ASA case where the complaint was not upheld.
Direct Wines Ltd, trading as The Sunday Times Wine Club, placed an ad in the Sunday Times newspaper in March 2022 offering “Half Price White Bordeaux”. The ad stated, “six bottles for £74.94, just £12.49 per bottle”.
The ASA received a complaint that the normal price of the wine had been inflated so they argued the half price claim was misleading.
In order to substantiate the claim, Direct Wines produced sales data covering 8 months from September 2021 when the wine, a L’Epiphanie de Bordeaux Blanc 2020, was available to buy and sales data for the promotional period (3 February – 11 March 2022, a period of 6 weeks). In addition, they provided sales data for 3 other time frames, September to October 2021, October to December 2021, and December 2021 to April 2022.
The offer was available through the Sunday Times newspaper and digital ads and the only way to redeem the promotional price was to enter the URL address in the press ad or click on a link in one of the digital ads.
Throughout this promotional period, if you did not qualify for the offer, the price of a bottle of wine was £25. There was a slightly reduced cost per bottle, £22.50, if you purchased a case (12 bottles) as this was standard quantity pricing.
The extent of the evidence meant the complaint was not upheld. Direct Wines had been able to show a consistent normal price of £25 per bottle prior to the promotion starting, and the 6 bottle case continued to be sold at £25 per bottle on the website during this period for those people who did not have access to the promotional offer.
The adjudication goes into further detail about the data they looked at, see https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/direct-wines-ltd-a22-1149166-direct-wines-ltd.html for more detail.
As you can see, substantiating a claim you want to make in your advert is not straightforward, and this needs to be considered when planning your marketing campaign, not thought about only if a complaint is made.