Ad description
A website for Family Fun Festival Ltd, www.weluvfestival.co.uk, seen on 10 March 2016, promoted a family festival in Liverpool. Text on the home page stated “80,000 Festival goers …”.
Issue
The complainant, who understood that the event was new, challenged whether the claim “80,000 Festival goers …” was misleading and could be substantiated.
Response
Family Fun Festival Ltd did not respond to the ASA’s enquiries.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA was concerned by Family Fun Festival Ltd’s lack of response and apparent disregard for the Code, which was a breach of CAP Code (Edition 12) rule 1.7 1.7 Any unreasonable delay in responding to the ASA's enquiries will normally be considered a breach of the Code. (Unreasonable delay). We reminded them of their responsibility to respond to our enquiries and told them to do so in future.
We considered that consumers were likely to understand from the claim “80,000 festival goers”, particularly in the context of other claims such as “a huge capacity crowd”, “the New ‘Grand National’ of music festivals!” and “‘big scale’ live music festival”, that it was expected that the event would sell 80,000 tickets and was therefore likely to be well-attended and popular.
However, in the absence of any evidence in support of the claim, we concluded that it had not been substantiated and 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. (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 Family Fun Festival Ltd not to suggest that an event carried a certain level of demand in the absence of adequate evidence.
