EE Wants Three To Drop ‘Undisputed’ Reliability Claim

EE has submitted a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) objecting to Three’s claim to be the ‘undisputed’ most reliable mobile network.

Three’s ‘make it right’ marketing campaign starring a purple puppet named Jackson started earlier this year across billboards and television, aiming to dispel many of the perceived myths about Three and how it fixes “stuff that sucks” in the mobile industry in a bid to tempt those sticking with more established rivals.

Three ‘undisputed’ claims

Three says its claim is substantiated by results from YouGov, but EE says this alone does not justify the term “unsubstantiated” because Three does not top the rankings in other tests, such as those conducted by RootMetrics.

“According to YouGov, Three has been rated the most reliable network by consumers on five consecutive occasions,” a Three spokesperson told TechWeekEurope. “Customers rated Three highest on all topics relating to reliability, such as reliability for calls and texts, reliability during the day and reliability during the evening. Three also came out top for ‘Overall Reliability’’. We are very proud of this accolade, which is why we have chosen to celebrate it in our current ATL activity.”

“We’d agree that reliability is critical to mobile customers. Purple puppets aside, it’s well known that to claim undisputed you need to win and unify the awards across all the awarding bodies,” an EE spokesperson added. “EE has recently won reliability awards, but that doesn’t make us ‘undisputed’. We’ve simply asked Three to reflect this.”

This is not the first time EE and Three have scrapped over claims made in the latter’s advertising. Last year, Three was banned from calling its DC-HSPDA network ‘3.9G’ following a complaint from EE, which believed the term implied the technology was close to that of 4G.

EE itself has been burnt by the ASA too. In May 2014, it was ordered not to repint an advert which claimed its fixed line broadband service was the best in Britain.

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