Three DFS television adverts have been banned - not because they are annoying but because the sofas featured in the adverts were made to look bigger than they actually are.
The ads, which featured people miming to the Nickelback song ‘Rockstar', were declared misleading by the Advertising Standards Authority because the footage of actors singing was superimposed onto shots of sofas, making the furniture seem bigger than it was.
The watchdog, which received 21 complaints, said: "We considered that the production technique used in the ad meant that some of the sofas did appear large in relation to the actors. Because DFS had not been able to demonstrate that the sofas featured in the ad were accurate reflections of the actual sofas, we concluded that the ad was misleading."
DFS argued that customers visited their stores to examine items such as sofas before they bought them, and that any exaggeration in size would have caused widespread disappointment and large numbers of complaints to Trading Standards, which had not been the case.
The three advertising codes breached by the DFS campaign were that adverts must not mislead the public, that they must not imply qualities beyond those normally provided, and that they must not use visual techniques or special effects to mislead.
