ASA Adjudication on Bradford & Bingley plc

Ad

An internet ad was headlined "Tell me about the 'Property Woman of the Year' Awards." The ad stated "Judging will be based on your financial nous, feedback from your tenants, how long it took to build your business, how you run it, and your personal drive and determination to succeed. We don't want much do we?"

Issue

The complainant, who was shortlisted for her region in that tier of the competition but did not win, challenged whether the competition had been properly administered. She said she had not been asked to provide any evidence which might objectively be compared with that of other competitors and believed the regional winners may have been chosen without verification.

CAP Code (Edition 11)

Response

Bradford & Bingley Plc (B&B) said they took their responsibilities under the CAP Code very seriously. They said they had appointed a PR firm to advise on the best way to structure and promote their competition. They said it was advertised on their website, via a press release, and independently via the National Landlord Association's e-mail alert, and was open to any woman with a buy to let property, regardless of whether or not they held mortgages with B&B.

They said they had appointed a panel of three experts to judge all aspects of the competition, including the regional heats and had ensured some of them were independent of B&B. They said the competition had a full set of legal terms and conditions accessible from the website and these set out the criteria on which competition entrants would be judged, namely: financial acumen, how long it had taken to build up their business, how they ran their business including property conditions, and their personal drive and enthusiasm.

B&B said that entries, of which there were 50 in total, were first checked in-house to ensure entrants had filled out the forms correctly and provided sufficient information. They said that at stage one of the competition the entries from all those shortlisted in the regional heats were submitted to the judges, who were asked to score them based on criteria which distilled those set out in the competition rules into four easy to score categories. B&B said these were: "overcoming personal obstacles"; "clear business strategy explained", "taking some form of risk in their venture" and "overall success (evidence of making a reasonable profit on a property portfolio)". They said the judges awarded scores of between 1 and 5 for each category, with 5 being the highest.

B&B said that, at stage two of the competition, once the regional shortlisted candidates were scored and winners chosen for each region, their PR company contacted the tenants of the regional winners to check their credibility and to obtain views on matters such as property upkeep. They said a team from B&B also checked semi-finalists on their Mortgage Express database (MX) to establish if the accounts they held were properly conducted. They said that, if any of the regional winners did not have properties with them, they searched through HM land registry. They sent documents from the PR company employed to manage the competition to show that. B&B said this further information was then cross-referenced with the scores the judges had previously given to the eight semi-finalists, in order to arrive at the overall winner.

B&B said they accepted that whilst verification checks were carried out on semi-finalists (winners of the regional heats) they were not carried out on all applicants, but said they believed this was a reasonable and proportionate way for them to have administered the competition.

They sent Judges Packs for the two independent judges, but not for the third in-house judge, detailing the scores given by them to those entrants shortlisted in the regional heats of the competition, which lead to the choice of regional winners. They said unfortunately the in-house judge had destroyed her records after the final as she had not foreseen the need to keep them. However, they sent the PR company's records of all three of the judges' scorings on the semi-finalists for the regional heats.

Assessment

Upheld

We noted B&B had ensured independent judges were appointed to their competition. We also noted that each entrant shortlisted in the regional heats of the competition was numerically scored by the three judges based on four criteria. However, we noted that the regional shortlists put before the judges were drawn from all entries in-house and that the process and criteria for regional short-listing were unclear.

We noted the ad stated "Judging will be based on your financial nous, feedback from your tenants, how long it took to build your business, how you run it, and your personal drive and determination to succeed." We considered that the four scoring categories given to the judges; "overcoming personal obstacles", "clear business strategy explained", "taking some form of risk in their venture", "overall success (evidence of making a responsible profit on property portfolio)" did not map clearly onto the criteria set out in the ad. We noted the ad did not mention "overcoming personal obstacles" or "taking some form of risk in their venture" as judging criteria. We also noted that "feedback from your tenants" was a criterion that had been applied only to the regional winners to determine the overall winner from amongst them, and considered the ad gave the misleading impression this criterion would be applied across the board. We concluded that B&B had not satisfied us that they had administered the promotion according to the criteria stated in the ad and thereby dealt fairly with entrants throughout all stages of the competition.

The ad breached CAP Code clauses 27.4 (Promotions) and 34.1a (Promotions: participation) and 35.9f (Promotions: judging).

Action

We told B&B to ensure the advertised judging procedures and criteria for their competitions matched those applied in practice in future.

Adjudication of the ASA Council (Non-broadcast)