Ad description
Text on the Island Furniture Company website viewed in June 2011 stated, “MASSIVE SPRING SALE HURRY! Must End Midnight on Sunday! ...”.
Issue
The complainant challenged whether the claim “... HURRY! Must End Midnight on Sunday! ...” was misleading, because she understood similar text had appeared for several months.
Response
The Island Furniture Company said they usually had different sales on a monthly or weekly basis, which would generally end at midnight on Sunday or on the last day of the month. They said they sometimes offered a free mattress with their beds and allocated a certain number of mattresses in those instances. When the allocated stock was sold, they would generally close the offer until they decided to run it again to boost sales. The Island Furniture Company said they often repeated sales if a successful formula had been repeated in the past and their sales would normally involve a particular time frame, which was determined either by a specific end date or by the quantity of stock allocated to the sale.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA noted The Island Furniture Company’s comments. We also noted however they did not explain why the claim “MASSIVE SPRING SALE HURRY! Must End Midnight on Sunday! ...”, or similar, had appeared for several months. We considered the claim implied the promotion was shortly due to end. However, we understood that was not the case and noted the claim continued to appear in September 2011. We therefore concluded that the ad was misleading.
The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 3.1 Marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so. (Misleading advertising) and 3.31 3.31 Marketing communications must not falsely claim that the marketer is about to cease trading or move premises. They must not falsely state that a product, or the terms on which it is offered, will be available only for a very limited time to deprive consumers of the time or opportunity to make an informed choice. (Availability).
Action
The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told The Island Furniture Company to ensure future ads did not imply a promotion was available only for a limited time if that was not the case.
