Ad description
A poster seen on 6 August 2011 for an interactive movie experience at Madame Tussauds featured images of superheroes, with text around the image stating "AMAZING", "STUPEFACENTE", "ERSTAUNLICH" and "A NE PAS MANQUER". Under each word were five stars.
Issue
A complainant challenged whether the ad was misleading, because he believed the five stars under each word implied the experience had received positive reviews from critics.
Response
Merlin Entertainments Group Ltd (Merlin) said the poster was designed with the theme of a pastiche of a real movie poster. They said the four phrases were based on actual feedback and comments left on their touchscreen kiosk from guests, and from online blogs. They said 43,926 guests had ranked the experience, and the average rating was 9.4 out of 10. Merlin said for ease of understanding, and to give it a movie poster feel, they used artistic licence to translate 9.4 out of 10 to five stars.
Merlin said they translated the reviews into various languages to reflect the diversity of the guests they welcomed at Madame Tussauds every year. They said over 80% of their guests were from overseas, so they felt it was appropriate to translate guest comments to help those guests who may not speak or read English as a first language.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA noted that the poster was produced as an imitation of movie posters, with four comments and five stars under each comment. However, we noted that unlike movie posters, the comments were not attributed to any critic, and therefore considered that readers would be aware the comments did not relate to reviews, but to comments from visitors to the experience.
We noted the words "STUPEFACENTE" and "ERSTAUNLICH" were Italian and German for "amazing", and "A NE PAS MANQUER" was French for "don't miss it". We noted Merlin had submitted 16 comments from their touchscreen kiosk, and a comment from an online blog, and that that feedback showed one visitor had expressed in English that the experience was amazing, while the blog comment stated "Don't miss it" in English.
Whilst we acknowledged many visitors to Madame Tussauds were from overseas, we considered that the three phrases on the poster in Italian, German and French implied visitors from those countries had made those comments, when they were in fact translations from English. We also considered that featuring five stars under the four phrases implied four people had rated the experience as being five stars, when we understood that visitors had not been asked to give the experience a star rating. Therefore, while we did not consider the poster implied the experience had received positive reviews from critics, we considered that the poster gave the impression the comments were genuine quotes from visitors to the experience. Because they were not we concluded 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. (Misleading advertising).
Action
The ad must not appear in its current form again.
