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Three UK Advert Banned for Misleading “Lowest Price” Claim

Wednesday, Feb 3rd, 2016 (8:37 am) - Score 497

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned a banner advert for Three UK’s service after it misleadingly claimed to offer the “UK’s lowest price” on a tariff that bundled in the Samsung Galaxy S6 Smartphone for £35 per month. Except it wasn’t the cheapest.

According to Three UK the offer, which ran from 5th June to 15th July 2015, included 1GB of data with unlimited calls and texts. The operator then claims to have justified the wording by comparing their deal against all of their main competitors (O2, EE, Vodafone, Tesco Mobile and Virgin Media) and the indirect channel via Carphone Warehouse (representing the majority of the market).

However one woman complained that she was able to get a cheaper equivalent deal from both the Carphone Warehouse and another third-party seller. The ASA also found that Three UK had not provided enough information to fully substantiate their claim.

ASA Ruling (REF: A15-307500)

While we noted that the unlinked footnote text referred to particular retailers and to a particular point in time, we noted that it lacked prominence and, nevertheless, we considered that the information was not sufficient to counteract the overall impression that the claim “the UK’s lowest prices” related to all retailers and was accurate at the time the ad was seen.

We noted Three’s assertion that the retailers included in the comparison constituted over 95% of the contract handset market. However, we noted that the independent market share data provided related to all sales achieved across all channels, not solely the named retailers’ direct sales. Therefore, while we acknowledged that the sales data provided was likely to represent a large proportion of the market, it was not possible to determine the exact market share covered in the comparison.

Further, we considered that to substantiate the claim, “the UK’s lowest price”, Three needed to provide comparative sales data covering all mobile retailers across the UK. Therefore, in the absence of that data, we concluded that the claim was misleading.

As usual the ASA told Three UK to stop being a naughty operator and #makeitright by ensuring that the basis of any future comparative claims were both clear and avoided misleading consumers with limited comparisons of the market.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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