Ad description
A page on the website www.nationwidepaintball.co.uk, for a paintball booking service, stated "Nationwide Paintball UK have carefully selected top paintballing games sites in the UK and incorporated them into our network ... Browse our 100+ locations". On the booking page, when "Bath" was selected as the location, text stated "Description ... Paintball Newbury is Berkshire's newest addition of paintball sites across thre [sic] UK".
Issue
The complainant challenged whether the location information given on the website was misleading, because the Newbury centre was a considerable distance from a number of the locations it was linked to.
Response
Nationwide Paintball (NP) said that in 2011 they had acquired a paintball business located near Newbury and that, in order to push business to the new site, it had been linked to a number of key locations on their website, despite the fact that there may be other paintball centres closer to those towns and cities.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA noted that some of the locations that had been linked to the Newbury site were a considerable distance from it, for example, Bath which was 65 miles away. We considered that consumers would expect the paintball site they were directed to, to be within a reasonable distance of the town or city selected, and for it to be the nearest paintball site in the network to that town or city. Because that was not necessarily the case, we concluded that the ad was misleading.
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 NP to ensure, in future, that they did not link paintball sites to towns and cities that were not in the vicinity of those sites.
