Naughty BT
Anyone who has watched TV, even briefly, in the past few years will be familiar with the BT broadband ads featuring that bloke out of My Family. Well it looks like BT has been getting a bit carried away with the claims made in them and has been put on the naughty step by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
The TV ad in question is the one that involves the BT couple looking for a new house and Mrs BT being able to access the net quicker than the hapless estate agent because she's on BT and he isn't. The voice over then says: "BT is rolling out up to 20 meg speeds to give you a consistently faster broadband throughout the day even at peak times." Three radio ads and a national press ad were also scrutinised over similar claims.
The ASA received 17 complaints, including ones from Sky, Virgin and TalkTalk highlighting the following issues:
1. The ‘faster even at peak times' claim was in comparison with BT's 8mbps service and was misleading because it couldn't be proved to be true at all times.
2. Surfing typical websites is not necessarily any faster with a 20mbps service than an 8mbps one.
3. The speed demonstrated on Mrs BT's notebook was faster than would usually be achieved at any connection speed.
4. ‘Consistently faster' claims were misleading because BT operates a traffic management policy.
5. The limited availability of the 20mbps service was not made clear.
6. Comparisons to industry average speeds were not independently obtained.
7. The industry average claims are contradicted by a recent Ofcom survey.
All the complaints were upheld bar the last, which was because Ofcom's study didn't include BT's 20mbps service. The ASA ruled that the ads can't appear again in their current form and the restrictions on the 20mbps service must be made clear in future. You can see the full ASA ruling here.
We received the following comment from BT:
"We're disappointed by the ASA's overall adjudication, but pleased that it rejected Virgin's and TalkTalk's claim that BT does not offer consistently faster broadband speeds than the industry average.
"We were concerned by a number of factors in the ASA's adjudication, for example, that not all customers could achieve consistently faster speeds - this was based on the fact that less than one per cent could not do this. The ASA also commented that we should adjust our data to allow for differing line lengths, had we done this in the way suggested it would have increased our lead over other firms.
"When the ads appeared we wanted to highlight our offer of consistently faster web browsing through up to 20Mb broadband in newly enabled exchange areas; there was no intention to mislead."
