BT Broadband Ad banned by ASA

stockhausen

stockhausen

stockhausen

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An ad in BT's long-running "Adam and Jane" campaign has been banned for misleading customers over the speed of the company's broadband.

The instalment in the ongoing saga showed Adam being shown around a property by an estate agent as he talked to Jane on his mobile, who was viewing the house online from her home computer. It shows the estate agent waiting for a webpage to load, while Jane loads the website instantly and quickly looks at a series of images. The estate agent apologises to Adam, saying: "Six o'clock. Half the world's online." A voice-over then adds: "BT is rolling out up to 20 meg speeds to give you a consistently faster broadband throughout the day even at peak times."

The ASA said: "Because we had not seen sufficient evidence to support the claim that BT's new broadband service was consistently faster than its existing 8Mb service even at peak times, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead." It said viewers could expect the internet speed demonstrated by Jane to be available to them, adding that this was not the case. (LINK)
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Well done the ASA - it is about time that ISPs were forced to give meaningful, attainable download figures rather than the lies that they currently put out.
 
Lol, I couldn't care for either of those. I'd much prefer it if they quashed the "unlimited (but a fup of 50GB)" claims, they're far more misleading.
 
benftl said:
Lol, I couldn't care for either of those. I'd much prefer it if they quashed the "unlimited (but a fup of 50GB)" claims, they're far more misleading.
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I suspect that those claims are absolutely irrelevant for the vast majority of people.

The %age of people (aka Pirates) who want to download > 50GB per month is likely to be tiny and probably sufficiently well-informed to know all about "fair usage policies".
 
I don't understand why it was banned?

They are rolling out WBC (ADSL2+) to a lot of exchanges at the moment. So why aren't they allowed to advertise that fact?

The fact is MOST lines will get a speed boost from ADSL2+.

When I got ADSL2+ my line went from 8Mbit to 16Mbit instantly. My peak and off-peak downloads speeds were pretty much double what they were before. And I'm not even with BT!

It does sound as though BT are being targetted because of their size... which is unfair.
 
The thing that I think should be banned is the end of the current one where it says "use your BT landline, still the closest thing to actually being there"

Well no not really, surely using a Skype phone is exactly the same level of 'being there' and surely a video chat is even more closer to being there!

Grrrrrr that really annoys me!
 
Surely this ad has stopped airing now anyway? Not a lot of use banning it now. Although maybe in the future they will be a bit more careful.
 
stockhausen said:
I suspect that those claims are absolutely irrelevant for the vast majority of people.

The %age of people (aka Pirates) who want to download > 50GB per month is likely to be tiny and probably sufficiently well-informed to know all about "fair usage policies".
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It's easy to breach 50GB/month without being a pirate, but we won't be starting that tired old argument all over again.
 
If you actually read the judgement, it has nothing to do with ISPs being

stockhausen said:
forced to give meaningful, attainable download figures rather than the lies that they currently put out.
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but rather that the "demonstration" when she was browsng had been sped up afterwards in the same way as the old iPhone ads were (until the ASA stepped in).

The use of "up to" wasn't even up for debate here.
 
tolien said:
If you actually read the judgement ...
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I have no idea what point you are making here but I have read the ASA's judgement and I would suggest that they are talking about the speed of traffic (download and upload) on BT's broadband offering rather than just Jane's browsing demonstration:
[The ASA] considered the claim ... "consistently faster broadband even at peak times" when compared to BT's existing 8 Mbit/s service was categorical and therefore likely to lead consumers to expect that BT could demonstrate that that was the case in all instances.
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However you look at it, the complaint was that BT had used the advert to imply something about the speed of their broadband service and the ASA felt that the advert was misleading.

I believe that Ofcom has suggested that most adverts for broadband are misleading about the speeds that will actually be achieved in the real world.
 
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