Ad description

Cover wraps for The Negotiator magazine, on 25 February 2011 and 25 March 2011, for TDPG (The Digital Property Group).

a. Ad 1 stated “BREAKING NEWS ... ‘We provide ... unrivalled exposure...’² Third-placed property group. IGNORE THE HOOPLA! TDPG DELIVERS RESULTS 3 out of 4 homehunters [sic] are aware of a TDPG consumer brand¹ Brand awareness over 50% higher than the 3rd placed property portal group¹ ... Enquiries up - Our portfolio delivers seven times more enquiries than the 3rd placed property portal group⁵”. Small print stated “¹Source: Research NOW Oct 2010, 1059 homehunters [sic]. ²Source: Estateagenttoday.co.uk, 15.12.10 ... ⁵Source: TDGP internal data and figure reported in trade press, January 2011 ”.

b. Ad 2 stated “... IGNORE THE HOOPLA! TDPG DELIVERS RESULTS Seven times more enquiries than the third placed portal group¹ ...”. Small print “¹Source: TDPG internal data & figure reported within trade press, January 2011 ...”.

Issue

Zoopla Ltd challenged whether:

1. the claim “3 out of 4 homehunters [sic] are aware of a TDPG consumer brand” was misleading and could be substantiated;

2. the claim “brand awareness over 50% higher than 3rd placed property portal group” was misleading and could be substantiated;

3. the references to the “3rd placed property portal group” were misleading, because they believed there was no third placed property portal group;

4. the claim “Enquiries up - Our portfolio delivers seven times more enquiries than the 3rd place property portal group” was misleading, because TDPG included clicks to advertiser websites in their enquiry figure but Zoopla did not.

Response

1. & 2. The Digital Property Group (TDPG) said the claims in the ad were clearly linked to the source of the claim. They said Research Now had conducted a survey of 1,509 people in October 2010. They provided a summary of the research, saying it showed that 1,133 people (75.08%) had heard of at least one of their brands. They said that compared with only 632 people having heard of Zoopla, meaning brand awareness for TDPG was 79.3% higher than Zoopla.

TDPG said they did not agree with Zoopla’s claim that the data was out of date, saying they provided copy for the ad in mid-February when the data was less than four months old and had not been superseded by any other research at that point.

3. TDPG said there were many players in the online property website arena in the UK but there were three leading players, RightMove, TDPG and Zoopla. They said RightMove operated rightmove.co.uk, TDPG operated Findaproperty, PrimeLocation, Globrix, and Findanewhome.com, and Zoopla operated Zoopla.co.uk, UkPropertyshop and owned two URLs that redirected to the Zoopla site.

They said the concept of a portal, and who the top three companies were, was well understood in the property market and by estate agents, who were the chief users of the portals and the readers of The Negotiator. They said it was common for all three to be referred to as portal groups, and cited a trade magazine article which referred to the three companies as property portal groups. They also said that it should be noted that Comscore, a research company who provided statistics for both TDPG and Zoopla, provided figures for both companies as groups and as individual sites.

4. TDPG said they did not agree with Zoopla’s objection that it was industry standard to exclude clicks to agents’ websites when calculating enquiry levels, and said Zoopla had not included clicks in their enquiry levels because their website did not have that functionality, not because it was industry standard to do so. They said that operating in a digital space meant it was natural to include clicks and said that disregarding them would give a distorted result. TDPG said consumers were generally only interested in the total number of enquiries received as a result of advertising on the website, not in the way the enquiries reached them. They said including clicks was simply comparing total enquiry levels, regardless of the enquiry channel.

Assessment

1. & 2. Not upheld

The ASA accepted that the Research Now survey showed three out of four home hunters had heard of one of TDPG’s brands, and that brand awareness was over 50% higher for TDPG brands than Zoopla. While we noted Zoopla had conducted research in March 2011 which found different results, we considered the data was correct and relevant at the time of publication, and therefore considered the claims had been substantiated and were not misleading.

On this point we investigated the ad under CAP Code (Edition 12) rules  3.1 3.1 Marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so.  and  3.3 3.3 Marketing communications must not mislead the consumer by omitting material information. They must not mislead by hiding material information or presenting it in an unclear, unintelligible, ambiguous or untimely manner.
Material information is information that the consumer needs to make informed decisions in relation to a product. Whether the omission or presentation of material information is likely to mislead the consumer depends on the context, the medium and, if the medium of the marketing communication is constrained by time or space, the measures that the marketer takes to make that information available to the consumer by other means.
 (Misleading advertising) and  3.7 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.  (Substantiation) but did not find it in breach.

3. Not upheld

We noted the ad was in a publication primarily read by estate agents, who were likely to be aware of the three major companies in the property portal market, and would understand what was meant by the term “property portal group”. We therefore concluded the use of the term “3rd placed property portal group” was not misleading.

On this point we investigated the ad under CAP Code (Edition 12) rules  3.1 3.1 Marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so.  and  3.3 3.3 Marketing communications must not mislead the consumer by omitting material information. They must not mislead by hiding material information or presenting it in an unclear, unintelligible, ambiguous or untimely manner.
Material information is information that the consumer needs to make informed decisions in relation to a product. Whether the omission or presentation of material information is likely to mislead the consumer depends on the context, the medium and, if the medium of the marketing communication is constrained by time or space, the measures that the marketer takes to make that information available to the consumer by other means.
 (Misleading advertising) but did not find it in breach.

4. Upheld

We noted that Zoopla’s enquiry level figure was made up of e-mails and phone calls to agents, while TDPG included e-mails, phone calls and clicks through to view a property on an agent’s own website.

We noted that clicking through to an agent’s website did not involve contacting the agent, unlike e-mailing or telephoning them. A click through from an ad to the agent’s website simply allowed a user to view the property on the agent’s website, but did not involve any agent contact.

Therefore, while we acknowledged that Zoopla may not have included clicks because their site did not have that functionality, we considered TDPG should not have included clicks in enquiry levels because they involved no agent contact. We therefore concluded the comparison was misleading.

On this point the ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules  3.1 3.1 Marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so.  and  3.3 3.3 Marketing communications must not mislead the consumer by omitting material information. They must not mislead by hiding material information or presenting it in an unclear, unintelligible, ambiguous or untimely manner.
Material information is information that the consumer needs to make informed decisions in relation to a product. Whether the omission or presentation of material information is likely to mislead the consumer depends on the context, the medium and, if the medium of the marketing communication is constrained by time or space, the measures that the marketer takes to make that information available to the consumer by other means.
 (Misleading advertising) and  3.38 3.38 Marketing communications that include a comparison with an unidentifiable competitor must not mislead, or be likely to mislead, the consumer. The elements of the comparison must not be selected to give the marketer an unrepresentative advantage.  (Other comparisons).

Action

The ad must not appear again in its current form.

CAP Code (Edition 12)

3.1     3.3     3.38     3.7    


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