Ad description

A post on Vintage Inns’ Facebook page, dated 2 April 2017, which featured an image of a fillet steak with the text “Fixed price dinner Enjoy 2 courses from £10.95”. The post included a link to a page containing the fixed price menu.

Issue

The complainant challenged whether the ad was misleading because it did not feature the fillet steak on the fixed price menu.

Response

Mitchells & Butlers plc t/a Vintage Inns did not respond to the ASA’s enquiries.

Assessment

Upheld

The ASA was concerned by Official Vintage Inns’ lack of response and apparent disregard for the Code, which was a breach of CAP Code (Edition 12) rule  1.7 1.7 Any unreasonable delay in responding to the ASA's enquiries will normally be considered a breach of the Code.  (Unreasonable delay). We reminded them of their responsibility to provide a response to our enquiries and told them to do so in future.

We considered that consumers would understand from the post that the fillet steak would be included in the fixed price promotion; however, it appeared that this was not the case as it did not feature on the fixed price menu linked to in the ad. We therefore concluded that the ad was misleading.

The ad breached CAP Code 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 Vintage Inns not to feature images of items that were not available on the fixed price menu. We referred the matter to CAP’s compliance team.

CAP Code (Edition 12)

1.7     3.1     3.3    


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