ASA Slam Vodafone Ad

Have you ever read an advert and thought ‘this sounds too good to be true’? Unfortunately most of the time it is! That’s why the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) vet campaigns to ensure they are not misleading.

The ASA recently received a complaint challenging an advertisement that Vodafone had been running to promote their mobile internet services. The advert stated ‘any website, any time. £7.50 per month’. Customers defined this as meaning that you received unlimited internet usage for £7.50 per month.

The £7.50 per month deal actually offers 120MB of UK data allowance per month, which clearly isn’t what the advert implies. Vodafone surprisingly define ‘any’ time as meaning ‘some’ or ‘the smallest amount of’! I would interpret ‘any website, anytime’ as indicating that you are not restricted to the websites that you visit or what time throughout the day that you visit them. The fact that the £7.50 per month does not indicate a specified usage allowance does make it seem that there is no limit to how much time you spend browsing the web.

The ASA have upheld the complaint due to the fact that customers would interpret the headline as unlimited internet access rather than the 120MB that Vodafone are actually selling. Vodafone have been told not to use the advert again, due to the misleading text and the fact that the disclaimer at the bottom of the advert was not prominent enough.

A note to all of you – always check the small print!

John Gray writes articles about mobile phones and the latest mobile phone deals