UK ISP TalkTalk Coughs to Misleading Savings on Leaflet Advert

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has confirmed that they’ve opened an investigation after TalkTalk admitted that they’d got the pricing wrong on one of their snail mailed leaflet adverts, which promised that new customers could “save up to £476 vs BT, [Sky Broadband] and [Virgin Media]“.

The advert itself claimed that a number of TalkTalk’s most popular bundles were currently benefiting from a “50% off” discount (this doesn’t apply to line rental, but that’s not clearly stated). The ISP then proceeded to compare their unlimited “fibre broadband” (FTTC) package with similar options from the three rival ISPs (above), although some of the stated savings appeared to be a bit loopy.

The “average” monthly rental for TalkTalk’s benchmarked package over 18 months was listed as £26.45 per month (this is correct), while the BT alternative came out at £41.31. We don’t know precisely when the leaflet was published and so it’s difficult to do an accurate comparison (offers change too frequently), but certainly the monthly rates don’t match BT’s current Infinity pricing.

However the most glaring problem stemmed from TalkTalk’s savings claim, such as its assertion that customers would “SAVE up to £476 vs BT” over an 18 month period. Sadly this doesn’t appear to be correct and even if we use TalkTalk’s figures you still get the following outcome: TalkTalk £26.45 * 18 = £476.10 versus BT’s £41.31 * 18 = £743.58 (savings difference £267.48). The same sort of problem exists on the comparison with Sky and Virgin.

A TalkTalk Spokesperson said (The Register):

“While the small print had the correct breakdown of charges, one of the quoted savings was wrong. We stopped sending out the material as soon as the mistake was discovered, are liaising with the Advertising Standards Authority and are taking steps to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again.”

Apparently the complaint was forwarded by one of TalkTalk’s ex-subscribers, Malcolm Williams, who notes as we do that there appears to be more than just a single error on the quoted savings. In any case the ASA expects to rule on this within the next few weeks and it represents bad timing for TalkTalk, which is surely hoping to relaunch itself after the recent cyber-attack (here).