Ad description
A direct mailing for U Claim 4 Me Management Service received on 16 July 2019 which was sent in a plain envelope. Text on the outside of the letter stated “Deadline – 29th August 2019 Important Information Enclosed Please open immediately!”. Text visible through the window of the envelope stated “Notification of deadline enclosed”. Small text in the corner on the back of the envelope stated “Contains Marketing”.
Issue
The complainant challenged whether the ad was obviously identifiable as a marketing communication.
Response
Waterloo Solutions Ltd t/a UClaim4Me said that they would no longer use the envelope in its current form and would make improvements to it in future.
Assessment
Upheld
The CAP Code required that marketing communications were obviously identifiable meaning that consumers should be able to tell from the envelope itself that it was a marketing communication. The ASA noted that the front of the envelope stated “Deadline – 29th August 2019 Important Information Enclosed” and “Please open immediately”. Through the envelope window was visible: “Notification of deadline enclosed”. We considered this implied that the envelope contained private official correspondence. While the reverse of the envelope stated “Contains Marketing”, this was in very small text in the bottom right-hand corner. We considered that was insufficient to ensure that the envelope was obviously identifiable as a marketing communication, because recipients were likely to open the envelope on the basis of the text on the front, without paying attention to the small print on the reverse, which could easily have been overlooked.
For those reasons we concluded that the ad was not obviously identifiable as a marketing communication and therefore breached the Code. The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 2.1 and 2.3 (Recognition of Marketing Communications).
Action
The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Waterloo Solutions Ltd to ensure future ads were clearly identifiable as marketing material.
