ASA Adjudication on Betfair Ltd

Ad

Two posters, for a betting exchange, stated "40% BETTER SP…"

Issue

A pressure group, Straight Statistics, challenged whether the claim was misleading and could be substantiated.

CAP Code (Edition 11)

Response

Betfair Ltd said the claim was intended to communicate to consumers that the returns available to gamblers taking Betfair's own Starting Price (SP) were on average 40% better than those available to gamblers taking the industry SP. They explained that most bets on horse racing in high street betting shops were settled at the industry SP. They said the price represented the odds available for each horse to win at the start of every race and the term 'SP' was well recognised in gambling.

Betfair said they had launched their own SP in December 2007 as an entirely separate SP, the Betfair SP (BSP). In a manner similar to the industry SP, they said the BSP returned a price for each horse in every British and Irish horse race, which again was calculated at the start of each race. Betfair sent a spreadsheet comparing the BSP to the industry SP for every winning horse, just over 17,000, since the BSP was launched. They pointed out that, based on a £10 stake at the BSP, a gambler would have been £460,817 better off than making the same bets at the industry SP;  that figure equated to the BSP being 41% better than the industry SP and the claim was based on that figure.

Betfair said the claim was not intended to guarantee that Betfair customers would, in every case, receive returns at BSP which were at least 40% better than those available from the industry SP. They maintained that the claim would be seen as an average and consumers would understand that sometimes the returns available from the BSP would be less than 40% better and sometimes they would be more than 40% better. They believed that the nature of the comparison would be clear to consumers and maintained that they were not giving an impression of the typical relationship between the Betfair SP and the SP.

Assessment

Upheld

The ASA noted Betfair's argument that the claim "40% BETTER SP..." would be understood by consumers as a factual statement of the average difference between the BSP and industry SP. We noted the comparison of SP and BSP odds for winning horses sent by Betfair and acknowledged that it demonstrated the accuracy of the average difference between the two. However, we noted the ad stated "40% BETTER SP" and was not qualified in any way and considered that consumers were likely to infer that such a figure was typical of what they could expect when betting at the BSP, although we acknowledged that consumers were unlikely to expect that to be the case in all instances.

We noted Betfair's data demonstrated that a significant majority of winners had a significantly lower difference between BSP and the industry SP. Around 3000 of the total 17,000 races had a BSP either the same or worse than the industry SP and around 12,000 had a BSP that was only 20% better or less, while around only 2000 had a BSP that was 40% better or more. We considered that the basic average figure used by Betfair was skewed due to the influence of winners with very long odds, which tended to have a disproportionately higher difference between BSP and SP. Because we considered that Betfair had not shown that the average figure they used was typically representative of the difference between the BSP and SP, we considered that the claim was likely to mislead.

The ads breached CAP Code clauses 3.1 (Substantiation), 7.1 (Truthfulness) and 19.1 (Other comparisons).

Action

The ads must not appear again in their current form.

Adjudication of the ASA Council (Non-broadcast)