ASA Ban O2 UK Tweet Ad for Misleading EU Mobile Data Roaming Offer

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned a Twitter tweet advert from O2 UK after it misleadingly claimed that customers using their Mobile Broadband connection to roam while travelling around Europe would only need to pay £1.99 for a day’s worth of data usage, which failed to mention the tiny usage allowance.

The tweet, which was posted on 4th July 2013, stated: “Jetting off this year? Brag about the sunshine with #O2Travel pay just £1.99 to use data for the day in Europe: http://o2lin.kr/o2-travel“. But six complainants said that the promotion was “misleading” because it suggested that the price applied to data-use for an entire day when it was actually subject to a 15MB (MegaByte) limit.

The ASA ultimately ruled “that the data allowance was a significant piece of information that should have been included in the original tweet ad and considered that it was not sufficient for that information to be included in a website link from that tweet” (here). Consumers who visited the linked webpage also had to scroll down in order to see the limit.

As usual the ASA banned the advert and told O2 to make any data restrictions clear on future tweets. The strict character limit on tweets can make doing honest advertising much more difficult because the space usually doesn’t exist to list all of the key caveats.