ASA Bans ‘Misleading’ Virgin Broadband Ads

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned several press, circular and television advertisements from Virgin Media following complaints about misleading price and speed claims.

The ASA said it received 18 complaints about a Virgin advertising campaign featuring sprinter Usian Bolt that set out headline price claims that didn’t include monthly fees for the required Virgin telephone line rental.

Complaints upheld

The watchdog received a complaint from BT for a second Virgin ad that claimed to offer “the UK’s fastest broadband”.

In both cases the complaints were upheld and Virgin was advised the advertisements cannot be run again in their current form.

The adverts featuring Bolt appeared in circulars, on television and in the national press. The ASA agreed the headline prices quoted didn’t adequately reflect the fact that customers were required to also pay Virgin a monthly line rental.

Virgin noted that the line rental pricing information had been included in the body copy of the press ad, not in a footnote, as well as in supertitles in the television ad. The broadband provider said this was in line with industry practice, according to the ASA.

The ASA concluded that Virgin’s efforts didn’t go far enough.

“Although we acknowledged that the cost of the line rental from Virgin had been included in the ads, we noted that it had not been included in the quoted headline price for each of the bundles,” the ASA said in its adjudication. “We noted that the Code required quoted prices to include non-optional charges that applied to buyers.”

Misleading speed claims

The watchdog advised Virgin that all non-optional fees must be included in headline prices in future. Virgin said the campaign, which began running in February, had in any case been scheduled to end at the end of March.

In the second case, Virgin’s claim to offer the UK’s fastest broadband speeds were judged to be misleading because of the existence of small operators that offer speeds faster than Virgin’s, the ASA said.

Virgin argued its claim was made in the context of an Ofcom/SamKnows report referred to in the ad, which covered 90 percent of the UK. “[Virgin] said the report found that no other broadband service measured by Ofcom had download speeds in excess of Virgin’s download speeds,” the ASA said in its adjudication.

The ISP added that the niche providers in question “did not offer their services in Virgin cabled areas, and so consumers who signed up with Virgin as a result of seeing the ad would not have been misled, because the fastest service they could get would be Virgin broadband”.

The ASA disagreed, finding that the claim of “the UK’s fastest broadband” was an absolute claim and therefore was misleading.

“We understood that there were some instances of localised niche providers that delivered download speeds which were faster,” the ASA said. “We understood that those equated to a small percentage of homes in the UK, but nonetheless considered that, because some UK consumers could achieve faster download speeds than those delivered by Virgin, the claim was misleading.”

Virgin was told to pull the ad and not to make similar claims in the future unless they held adequate evidence to substantiate them.

Earlier this year, guidelines came into force that mean ISPs will have to show at least 10 percent of their customer base can enjoy their top advertised speed.

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