Virgin Media and the ASA round two

[Scubbie]

thinkbroadband :: Virgin Media and the ASA round two

Virgin Media has been taken to task over the lack of prominence for its voice line rental when it is required to qualify for a promotional offer. Someeighteen complaints were received by the ASA about a TV ad, press ad and circular which promoted a bundle of services all including calls.
Virgin Media said that it was following advice from CAP on the positioning of the requirement to pay line rental, and what they had done was in line with industry practice. The ASA seemed not to agree and had the following to say:

"We noted that the Code required quoted prices to include non-optional charges that applied to buyers. We understood that the line rental was a compulsory monthly charge, which consumers were required to pay in order to obtain the bundle, and because it had not been included in the quoted headline price, we concluded that the ads were misleading."

Extract from ASA adjudication

It seems because people buying a Virgin Media cable service have no option to take their line rental or calls with another provider on that network, that in bundles that include calls, the line rental will have to be included in the headline price.

[Scubbie]

thinkbroadband :: ASA admonishes Virgin Media over UK fastest broadband claim

The *** for tat war as the advertising departments in BT and Virgin Mediaanalyse each others adverts continues, with BT complaining about an advert for the Virgin Media 50 Mbps service that was headed "Put yourself in pole position with up to 50 Mb broadband" and carried the line "Get the edge in gaming with the UK's fastest broadband, now half price for 6 months. - 7x faster than UK average download speeds".
BT wanted the "UK's fastest broadband" claim to be substantiated and felt it was misleading. The data backing up the Virgin Media claim was from the Ofcom speed testing, which only covers some 90% of the UK broadband market, i.e. the largest half dozen or so providers. We think more crucially the advert in a technology magazine appears to be promoting gaming where latency and jitter are more critical than raw download speed, something that BT and the ASA appear to have not mentioned at all.

The complaint was upheld because there are some smaller providers in the UK who do provide faster speeds to consumers, mainly because the advert could be interpreted as conveying the message that there are no faster options, no matter how small their coverage. Virgin Media usually adds a qualification such as 'widely available', which in this case was missing.