Background
Summary of Council decision:
Two issues were investigated, of which one was Upheld and one was Not upheld.
Ad description
A TV ad and poster for Gocompare.com:
a. The TV ad featured a voice-over saying "Tonight, back by popular demand, the man who has enriched the lives of millions" before the character Gio Compario appeared on a stage. Behind him, revolving text stated "40,000 QUOTES A DAY" while small print stated "Average number". Further small print appeared stating "Between '06-'15", followed by more revolving text that read "OVER 40 MILLION CUSTOMERS".
b. The poster ad stated "£3/4 BILLION SAVED ... Average for customers who bought and saved £137 (Car), £183 (Buildings & Contents) '06 - '15".
Issue
Confused.com challenged whether:
1. The claim "OVER 40 MILLION CUSTOMERS," which they believed did not accurately reflect the number of individuals who had used the service, was misleading and could be substantiated; and
2. The claim "£3/4 BILLION SAVED," which they believed was ambiguous as to whether the amount was 'three to four billion' or 'three quarters of a billion', was misleading.
Response
1. Gocompare.com Ltd stated that the reference to customers was to the number of distinct and validated accounts of customers who utilised the Gocompare.com service to obtain a quote in the period between November 2006 and March 2015. The insurance products compared by these customers were car, home, motorbike, van and pet, and also included gas and electricity prices. Customers were only counted once, regardless of the number of quotes they requested or retrieved, and no test quotes or test accounts were included. Individual product numbers were not added in order to provide a total, as they believed that would have resulted in customer accounts being counted on more than one occasion.
They said they were aware that a customer could have registered more than one account from 2006 to 2015, so they had applied a series of differentiators to the number of customer accounts so that each unique combination of first name, surname, date of birth and email address was counted as a single customer. They said that they recognised that some customers may have more than one account (with varying email addresses) and had considered using postcode information to differentiate these, but that this had resulted in a larger figure. They therefore took the original lower figure as the number of customers.
Clearcast stated that they received evidence from Gocompare to demonstrate that they dealt with 41,219,987 quoting customers for car, home, van, bike, and pet insurance and energy prices, between November 2006 and March 2015. They said the advertiser also provided an outline of how this amount was calculated: all customer accounts were included, with one per unique account ID where a quote had been completed, and excluding test quotes. The total only included customers with valid quotes. Their view was that a customer was someone who received a service from Gocompare.com. This did not have to be a paid-for service and they believed that signing up to the site and receiving a quote constituted a service. Clearcast provided the outline of the process that Gocompare.com had used to reach the figure, which explained that all customer accounts with a completed quote would be counted (only once regardless of the number of quotes obtained), that test data would be removed, that the quotes would be limited to the products mentioned above, and that the final number outputted represented the number of distinct customer accounts that were for valid customers who had used Gocompare.com to quote between the dates in question.
2. Gocompare.com stated that their intention had been to clearly refer to three-quarters of a billion pounds (sterling) and that they had decided to present this figure as a fraction, with three as the numerator and four the denominator, divided by a slanting bar the same height as the numerical figures. Their view was that presenting the figure as a fraction made it easier for consumers to grasp rather than using a decimal or percentage. They believed that the presentation they had used was commonplace in retail. Gocompare.com said they consciously avoided the approach used in scientific publications of fractions, where the whole fraction was represented as a single typographical character with a slanted bar, as this would necessarily reduce the size of the figures and negatively affect the legibility of the ad. They did not agree that the claim could be misinterpreted as 'three to four billion', in part because the only way of representing such a claim would be either "£3 to £4 billion" or "£3-4 billion". They also believed that a claim of that kind would be extremely ambiguous and therefore meaningless and that, read in conjunction with the precise savings claims noted in the ad as substantiation for the claim, it would be illogical and inconsistent for consumers to interpret the claim as the considerably more vague "three to four billion".
Assessment
1. Upheld
The ASA considered that consumers would understand the claim "OVER 40 MILLION CUSTOMERS" as a statement that over 40 million individual customers had used the Gocompare.com service to obtain a quote on at least one occasion. We understood that Gocompare.com had arrived at this figure by only counting accounts that had obtained a quote, which represented a customer using their service. We noted that 40 million customers over the period of a decade was a very large proportion of UK adults and that steps should have been taken to ensure that this figure was realistic, for example by determining the likely margin of error or the proportion of customers that could be expected to have registered more than one account. We considered that it was not unlikely that some customers would have registered more than one account, particularly over the relatively long time period of 2006 to 2015, and that reasonable steps should have been taken to determine whether accounts were duplicates and exclude an estimate of these from the final figure.
We understood that Gocompare.com had recognised this possibility and had therefore counted unique combinations of personal information in order to counteract the potential for multiple accounts to be registered to one person. However, we understood that they had not identified a method that would account for different email addresses being used by one person (since the combination of full name, date of birth and email address would create more than one unique combination of data for some people under these circumstances). We also understood that using full names to create unique combinations of personal data may not adequately exclude duplicate accounts because some people (such as those who changed their name through marriage or who were known by more than one name) could have more than one unique combination of registered data and therefore be counted more than once. Although we acknowledged that data relating to repeat quotes had been excluded and that attempts to remove other duplicate data had been made, Gocompare.com had not established whether the figure used in the ad was likely to be a reasonable estimate of the number of unique customers in light of the size of the number. Because we were not satisfied that the claim "OVER 40 MILLION CUSTOMERS" was based on a robust methodology that adequately took into account the possibility of duplicate accounts, we concluded that it had not been substantiated and that ad (a) was therefore misleading.
On this point ad (a) breached BCAP Code rules 3.1 3.1 Advertisements must not materially mislead or be likely to do so. (Misleading advertising) and 3.9 3.9 Broadcasters must hold documentary evidence to prove claims that the audience is 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).
2. Not upheld
Ad (b) presented the 'three-quarters' fraction as two level numerals divided by a forward slash, and the ASA considered that in some circumstances the division of two elements in this way would be understood as representing an 'or' statement. We considered that using super- and subscript numerals would be unequivocally representative of a fraction, but agreed that the approach used in ad (b) was also a generally recognisable way of presenting a fraction. In the context of an ad promoting the amount of money saved through using a service, which would be understood as a concrete and objective figure, we considered that consumers were unlikely to interpret "£3/4 BILLION" as the relatively vague "£3 or £4 billion" and would instead recognise the claim as containing a fraction. We therefore concluded that the claim was not ambiguously presented and was unlikely to mislead.
On this point we investigated ad (b) under CAP Code (Edition 12) rule 3.1 3.1 Advertisements must not materially mislead or be likely to do so. (Misleading advertising), but did not find it in breach.
Action
Ad (a) must not appear again in the form complained about. We told Gocompare.com Ltd not to repeat the claim "OVER 40 MILLION CUSTOMERS" and to ensure that future claims about customer numbers were based on a robust methodology that adequately took into account the possibility of duplicate accounts.
