UK ISP BT Infinity TV Ad Banned for Misleading 8x Faster Fibre Optic Claim

The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned a TV and website advert for BT’s superfast broadband BTInfinity (FTTC) service after they both made misleading claims about being able to offer “eight times faster fibre optic broadband” and “up to 8x faster than the UK average” speeds respectively.

The TV advert will be familiar to most people and featured a male character using an online dating service on his laptop. Towards the end some text read, “Speeds based on Infinity Option 2 average customer speed and UK ADSL average from Ofcom report Nov 2012” and this was followed by a voice-over that said, “Eight times faster fibre optic broadband. Infinity, from BT“. A bit of on-screen text then concluded “BT Infinity. 8 x faster fibre optic broadband“.

The second website advert stated “Infinity 2 has arrived … Up to 8x faster than the UK average“, while the small print added, “Eight times faster: speeds based on Infinity Option 2 average customer speed and UK average from Ofcom report, Feb 2012“.

One complainant said the speed claims were misleading because they did not believe they were based on the most up-to-date Ofcom report, which at the time was the regulators March 2013 publication where average speeds of 12Mbps were recorded (here). But BT countered that the claims were based on the most up-to-date report available at the time the ad itself was cleared and said that the speeds were compared against ADSL services and not the UK average.

ASA Ruling (REF: A13-228190)

We noted the on-screen text shown during part of the ad stated the comparison was with BT’s Infinity Option 2 and the UK ADSL average, and we acknowledged that BT’s service was eight times faster than the ADSL average. We noted the ad ended with larger on-screen text and a voice-over which did not state that the speed comparison was with ADSL. We understood that the March 2013 Ofcom report stated the average download speeds for fixed broadband for all connections was 12.0Mbit/s, which meant BT’s Infinity would be less than 8x faster than the overall average speed.

We considered that because the ad ended with larger on-screen text, together with a similar voice-over that omitted the comparison with ADSL, the small on-screen text shown during the initial part of the ad was insufficient to clearly qualify the claim. We therefore considered that consumers would be led to believe that the comparison was with all connections. The website made a similar speed claim and the comparison was not qualified by reference to ADSL.

Because the claims were not based on the most up to date data available at the time the complainant saw the ads, and because the ads did not clearly qualify the comparison, we concluded that ads were [both] misleading.

In addition, five complainants also challenged whether the depiction of the online dating service in the TV advert, which showed an extremely fast photo transfer and ticket buying process (i.e. most likely shortened for TV), was “misleading and exaggerated” the services performance. The ASA ultimately ruled that BT had not supplied enough evidence to show that this was the case and “concluded the ad exaggerated the performance of BT Infinity“.

As usual the adverts were banned and the ASA told BT to base any future speed claims on the “most up-to-date data and to present qualifications clearly in future“.