Ad description
The website www.platesforcars.co.uk, offering customisable car number plates, stated "Our Online Designer makes it possible to see the exact number plate and size before ordering". The "Design Online" page had fields for consumers to enter their requirements and a preview feature which displayed an image of the product that had been designed.
Issue
The complainant, who had ordered items after using the online designer, challenged whether the ad was misleading, because when he received his plates they did not feature any legal details, although this option had been selected and was displayed on the product preview.
Response
Plates for Cars explained that they could only legally add legal details to number plates that had been designed to be road legal. They said the options selected by the complainant did not comply with that requirement, because they featured a Mercedes badge and a space was not present in the middle of the registration number. They told us that the legal requirements were stated elsewhere on their website, but acknowledged that the designer function allowed the legal details option to be selected, previewed, and ordered by consumers, even when Plates for Cars would be unable to provide plates which featured those details. They said that no other customers had complained about the issue and that they did not therefore feel their website needed to be changed.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA acknowledged that an explanation of how to design plates that would be road legal was provided in another section of the website, but we were concerned that the design function page nonetheless allowed customers to add legal details to non-legal plate designs, without highlighting that the design would not be legal and therefore could not be supplied in that form. We understood that a non-legal plate designed by a customer would be adapted by Plates for Cars before it was sent to the customer to ensure that it was road legal. We noted the design page did not make clear that Plates for Cars would be unable to add legal details to a non-legal plate design and for that reason the plate preview image a customer saw would not necessarily be the same as the number plate they would receive.
We therefore concluded that, because the design page allowed customers to create and order a product that Plates for Cars was unable to supply, the page was misleading and breached the Code.
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).
Action
The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Plates for Cars to ensure that customers were only able to create products that Plates for Cars were able to provide in future.
