Ad description
Claims on The House Surgery Ltd's website, in February 2011, for its house doctoring services included a gallery of seven previous case studies. Each case study outlined the original house valuation before help from The House Surgery, the cost of the house doctoring work, the final valuation after help from The House Surgery, the amount the property sold for and the total profit made.
Issue
The complainant challenged whether the profit claims made for each of the case studies were misleading and could be substantiated.
Response
The House Surgery enquired about the complaint but did not respond in writing.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA noted that we had not seen evidence that demonstrated that the profit claims made for each of the case studies on the website were genuine. We therefore considered that the profit claims had not been substantiated, and concluded that 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) 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 The House Surgery Ltd not to make profit claims unless they held robust substantiation in support of those claims.
