Ad description
A teleshopping presentation on Price Drop TV on 8 March 2013 at around 3pm, for a pack of climbing roses, featured scrolling text at the bottom of the screen which stated "£10 CREDIT WITH EVERY PURCHASE YOU MAKE! FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY! For full T's & C's visit www.price-drop.tv". The presentation included the following statements about the £10 credit offer: "Today's the day. Seriously, I will tell you now, I've got full confidence that we would sell literally hundreds of these without that £10 credit offer ... get your £10 credit. We're just waiting to be told it's [the credit offer] over, because today at 7.14 we got an email saying we could continue on with this ... we can continue on with this for now, but there's no guarantee how long that can go on for."
Issue
The complainant, who noted that the terms and conditions on the website for the £10 credit offer stated that the promotion would run until 1:30 am on 9 March, challenged whether the claim that there was no guarantee how long the offer would continue was misleading and put undue pressure on consumers to make a purchase quickly.
Response
sit-up Ltd, t/a Price Drop TV (Price Drop TV) stated that the £10 credit offer had originally been scheduled to finish at 2am on 8 March, but that because of its popularity a decision was made by the management team to extend the promotion. An e-mail was sent to the channel's production teams at 7:14 am on March 8 to communicate that they should continue running the offer. At that point, it was undecided as to when the promotion would finish. This had led the host to state during the presentation that the offer could be pulled at any time. However, by the time of the broadcast it had been decided that the offer would end at 1:30 am on March 9 and the terms and conditions listed on the website had been updated accordingly. That fact had not yet been communicated to the production teams. Price Drop TV felt that consumers had not been misled because they had ultimately benefitted from the extended £10 credit offer and had more time to participate in the promotion.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA understood that the claim that there was no guarantee how long the £10 credit offer would continue had been made because the decision regarding the revised end date for the offer had not been communicated to the host by the time of the broadcast. We considered that viewers would understand the host's comments to mean that the £10 credit offer might end imminently and that they should act quickly in order to take advantage of the offer. Because we understood that there was a fixed end date and time for the offer, whilst the host had indicated otherwise, we considered that the host's claim was misleading and had placed undue pressure on viewers to make a purchasing decision. We therefore concluded that the presentation breached the Code.
The presentation breached BCAP Code rules 3.1 3.1 Advertisements must not materially mislead or be likely to do so. (Misleading advertising) and 3.31 3.31 Advertisements must not falsely claim that the advertiser is about to stop trading or move premises. They must not falsely state that a product or service, 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 be broadcast again in its current form. We told sit-up Ltd to ensure they did not suggest that there was no guarantee as to how long an offer would last if that was not the case.
