Ad description
A product page on Amazon was headed "Chlorine Dosing Tablets - Quick Dissolving by Pool Power - JAK Water UK Distributor ... Dispatched from and sold by JAK Water Systems". The page included a photograph and description of the product, Pool Power Mini Quick. A second seller was linked to the ad. Text stated "Condition New Our product is the clearwater brand".
Issue
JAK Water Systems Ltd challenged whether the claim, that the linked seller sold the product, was misleading, because they understood that Totally Toy Clearance did not sell Mini Quick and provided customers with a different product.
Response
Totally Toy Clearance acknowledged the complaint and said they would remove their seller link from the ad, but said they would not correspond further with the ASA.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA noted the seller link was not removed from the ad, even though Totally Toy Clearance had agreed to do so.
We understood that Totally Toy Clearance did not sell the Pool Power Mini Quick product and provided customers with a different brand. We noted text stated “Our product is the clearwater brand”, but considered that it was not sufficient to make clear to consumers that the brand name, photograph and description of the product did not apply to the product that Totally Toy Clearance was selling. We considered that consumers would expect that the chlorine dosing tablets they purchased would be the same as those featured in the ad and, because that was not the case, we concluded that the ad 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.
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.
3.4
3.4
For marketing communications that quote prices for advertised products, material information [for the purposes of rule 3.3] includes:
and
3.4.1
3.4.1
the main characteristics of the product
(Misleading advertising).
Action
The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Totally Toy Clearance to ensure that the products they offered customers were the same brand as those that appeared in the advertising.
