Ad description
A paid-for in-app ad, “It Costs More Than You Think”, seen on 1 October 2025 on a website for a campaign run by JTI to promote the awareness of illegal tobacco, featured the text, “Imagine more than half of shops near you selling illegal tobacco. Now stop imagining. It’s happening in Liverpool”.
Issue
The complainant, a professor specialising in the use of substances, challenged whether the claim that “more than half of shops” in Liverpool were selling illegal tobacco was misleading.
Response
Gallaher Ltd t/a JTI UK said the ad formed part of its “It Costs More Than You Think” campaign, launched in July 2025 to raise awareness of illegal tobacco, promote reporting tools and call for further Government action. It said the ad ran from 26 September 2025 to 3 October 2025 and was geo-targeted to the Liverpool area to coincide with the 2025 Labour Party Conference. It said it was no longer running the ad and did not intend to run it again.
JTI UK said the claim, “Imagine more than half of shops near you selling illegal tobacco. Now stop imagining. It’s happening in Liverpool”, was substantiated by test purchasing carried out by a registered private investigator. It said the investigator visited 55 stores in the Greater Liverpool area, and submitted store-by-store reports. Those reports included details such as the product bought, price, where the product was located in the store, and supporting images. JTI UK said it assessed the findings and concluded that 28 of the 55 stores (51%) were selling tobacco products not permitted for sale in the UK. On that basis, they believed they held documentary evidence to support the claim and the ad complied with the Code. They said they had shared that evidence with Trading Standards.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA understood that the ad was published as part of an awareness campaign on the trade of illegal tobacco. We understood that the ad was targeted to readers in Liverpool at the time of the 2025 Labour Party Conference. We considered that the audience of the ad would have included attendees of the Labour Party Conference, as well as the general public in Liverpool. We considered that readers would understand the claim “Imagine more than half of shops near you selling illegal tobacco. Now stop imagining. It’s happening in Liverpool” to mean there was substantial evidence that more than half of the shops in Liverpool which sold tobacco were selling illegal tobacco. We therefore expected to see robust evidence that this was the case.
JTI UK provided reports from test purchasing carried out by a registered private investigator in 55 shops in the Greater Liverpool area. The reports, which had been redacted to remove personal information, included the area and district code of each store visited, the date and time of each test purchase, details and images of the products purchased, where the purchased products were located in the store, and the price of each test purchase. JTI UK said that 28 of the 55 shops visited were selling tobacco products not permitted for sale in the UK. We acknowledged that the reports provided showed that, of the shops visited, more than half were selling tobacco products that were likely to be illegal to sell in the UK. However, we had not seen information about how the 55 shops were selected, or whether the 55 shops visited were a representative sample of all shops in the area, or all shops in Liverpool which sold tobacco. We had also not seen evidence considering what types of ‘shops’ had been selected, for example, whether they were corner shops or supermarkets. Further, we considered that the sample size of 55 shops was insufficient to make the claim that more than half of shops in Liverpool were selling illegal tobacco products. For those reasons, we considered the evidence was not sufficient to substantiate the claim in the ad.
Because we had not seen sufficient evidence to substantiate the claim that more than half of shops in Liverpool were selling illegal tobacco, we concluded that the claim had not been substantiated and was misleading.
The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 (Misleading advertising) and 3.7 (Substantiation).
Action
The ad must not appear again in the form complained of. We told Gallaher Ltd t/a JTI UK to ensure their future ads did not claim that half of shops in a given area sold illegal tobacco unless they held adequate substantiation.
