Ad description

A website, www.professionalcvcentre.com, featured text that stated “UK’s Leading Professional CV Writing Service … The Professional CV Centre is … an industry leading CV writing service to clients throughout the UK …”.

Issue

The complainant challenged whether the claims “UK’s Leading Professional CV Writing Service” and “The Professional CV Centre is … an industry leading CV writing service to clients throughout the UK” were misleading and could be substantiated.

Response

UKCVS Ltd did not respond to the ASA's enquiries.

Assessment

Upheld

The ASA was concerned by UKCVS Ltd lack of response and apparent disregard for the Code, which was a breach of CAP Code (Edition 12) rule 1.7 (Unreasonable delay). We reminded them of their responsibility to provide a response to our enquiries and told them to do so in future.

The ASA considered that consumers would interpret the claims “UK’s Leading Professional CV Writing Service” and “The Professional CV Centre is … an industry leading CV writing service to clients throughout the UK” to mean that UKCVS had advised more clients on their CVs than its competitors. However, UKCVS had not provided any data showing the number of CVs they had advised on compared with their competitors.

We therefore concluded that the claims had not been substantiated and were misleading.

The claims breached rules  3.1 3.1 Marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so.  (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).

Action

The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told UKCVS Ltd not to make claims that their CV writing service was “leading” without holding robust comparative evidence.

CAP Code (Edition 12)

3.1     3.7    


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