Ad description
A website for Onestream, onestream.co.uk, seen on 17 June featured options for 12-month broadband contracts. Text underneath the heading “80 Mbps” stated “£22.99/month”. Smaller text underneath the price stated “£25.74 from Apr 2027”. Further text, underneath a clickable button labelled “Select this speed”, stated “£14.95 one-off activation”.
Issue
The complainant, who understood that two subscriptions that could not be removed were added to the cost of the plan during the checkout process, challenged whether the price claim was misleading.
Response
Onestream Ltd stated that at the time the ad was seen, the Onestream Priority Plus and McAfee Multi Access services were presented in the checkout journey as optional additions which customers could remove if they did not wish to include them. As part of an ongoing review, those services had since been removed from the checkout journey and were now only available as optional extras for consumers who actively chose to add them. They provided two screenshots of the customer journey to illustrate how the services were presented to the consumer.
Assessment
Upheld
The ad featured details for a 12-month broadband package, and included the headline price “£22.99/month” in bold letters. We considered that consumers would understand from the ad that the total cost of the selected broadband package was £22.99 a month, and would expect that price to include all the relevant charges for the service.
We understood that, at the time the ad was seen, two subscriptions were automatically added to the broadband package during the checkout process. Both subscriptions included a free trial period, after which the “Onestream Priority Plus” subscription automatically renewed at a cost of £7.95 per month, and the “McAfee Multi Access” subscription automatically renewed at a cost of £34.95 per year. Onestream stated that the subscriptions were optional, could be cancelled during the free trial period, and could be removed during the checkout process. They provided a partial screenshot of the final checkout stage to illustrate how the subscriptions were presented to consumers at checkout. The screenshot showed a text box titled “Included with your order – free for 30 days” that contained brief information about the subscriptions. A “remove” option was included in the top right-hand corner of the text box in small font. We had not received a full copy of the webpage in order to be able to assess how clearly the information had been presented to consumers, but considered the option to remove the subscriptions was unlikely to be sufficiently prominent. Regardless, information about the subscriptions was not included in the ad. Consumers would therefore be unaware of the free trials, and the potential further costs associated with them, when choosing their broadband package. Although the costs of the subscriptions were not required to be included in the total price of the broadband service, we considered information about the free trials, including that they would automatically renew for a fee, was material to consumers’ understanding of what was included in the package. We therefore considered the omission of that information made the price claim misleading.
Because the ad did not include information about free trials which would automatically renew for a fee, we concluded it was misleading.
The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 and 3.3 (Misleading advertising) and 3.17 (Prices).
Action
The ad must not appear again in the form complained of. We told Onestream Ltd to ensure their ads made sufficiently clear that their broadband packages included free trials that would automatically renew for a fee.
