11:26am Thursday 26th August 2010
By Chris Holland
A long-running BT advertisement promoting new high-speed broadband service has been banned for misleading customers.
The TV, radio and press advertisements supported a £2.5 billion roll-out of faster fibre-based broadband services, which has already arrived in parts of Bradford, Shipley and Pudsey following work at local exchanges, which were among the first in the UK to be upgraded.
The offending ad in the ‘Adam and Jane’ campaign portrayed Adam viewing a property with an estate agent as he talked to Jane on his mobile phone.
Jane was viewing the house online from her home computer. It showed the estate agent waiting for a webpage to load, while Jane loaded the website instantly on BT and quickly looked at a series of images.
The estate agent apologised to Adam, saying: “Six o’clock. Half the world’s online,” before a voice-over added: “BT is rolling out up to 20 meg speeds to give you a consistently faster broadband throughout the day even at peak times.”
The advertisement drew 17 complaints from the public and competitors Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin, among them that the 20Mb (megabits per second) claim was misleading and could not be substantiated.
BT told the Advertising Standards Authority that its new service was faster than the old one, but that the sequence shown in the ad was not intended to be an actual comparison.
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.
It concluded: “We noted BT’s new service was available to fewer than half of all households and the roll-out, increasing that figure to 75 per cent, was anticipated to take around two years. We noted that a significant proportion of the population could not get the service at the time the ad appeared and therefore considered the ad should have made that clear. Because it did not, we concluded that it was likely to mislead.”
It ruled that the ads must not appear again in their current form.
BT said it had just started rolling out a new service and wanted to highlight the higher speeds available.
The company said: “There was certainly no intention to mislead, the images used were representative of the differences and our substantiation for the claims made in the advertising includes independent data from the leading global authority on broadband service delivery, Epitiro, and an expert statistician.”
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