ASA Ban TalkTalk Ads for Misleading Mid-Contract Price Rises Claim

A complaint by UK broadband ISP Plusnet has resulted in the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banning a website and TV advert for TalkTalk’s service, which saw them “misleadingly” claim to be the “only major provider to guarantee no mid-contract broadband price rises on all our plans.” Except they aren’t.

In its response TalkTalk said they compared their services against BT, Sky Broadband and Virgin Media, concluding that only their own products offered fixed prices on all their broadband plans. However TalkTalk admitted that other ISPs may have offered fixed price plans, although they did not deem Plusnet to be a “major provider.”

The advertising watchdog agreed that there was no accepted definition of “major provider” in the broadband market but they also noted that Plusnet had been included in one of Ofcom’s major quality of service reports (not to mention other ISPs like the Post Office, Vodafone etc. appearing in their quarterly complaints studies etc.).

ASA Ruling (REF: A18-465533)

We considered consumers would not generally be aware of the market share of each broadband provider and that there were other factors which influenced whether consumers would consider a company as a “major provider”, such as brand awareness, number of customers and advertising presence.

There was no accepted definition of a “major provider” in the broadband market, although we noted from Ofcom’s Comparing Service Quality 2017 report that Plusnet had been listed as a major provider of broadband. We considered that despite their lower market share, Plusnet provided services to a large number of customers and had a significant advertising presence. In light of that, we considered they would form part of the group of providers that consumers would readily identify as the leading names in the industry. Because Plusnet also offered fixed-price broadband packages, we concluded that the claims in ads (a) and (b) were misleading.

The ASA banned the advert and told TalkTalk not to make the same claim again unless they broadened their definition of “major providers” to include other ISPs that “consumers would readily identify as leading names in the industry.” Such a flaky definition could in theory result in some medium sized providers calling TalkTalk out for such claims in the future, if made again.