ASA Bans VOXI UK Mobile Advert for Misleading Price Claims

A complaint by rival UK mobile operator giffgaff has resulted in the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banning a website ad for VOXI – the MVNO sub-brand for Vodafone – over “misleading” price claims, which centres around the way they advertised their 12GB data (mobile broadband) plan for £10 per month.

The website ad for VOXI’s service, as seen on 30th April 2021, advertised a 12GB data plan for £10 per month – with the data allowance figure of “8GB” crossed through and text stating “EXTRA DATA“. But giffgaff, which is a virtual operator on O2’s (VMO2) platform, complained the ad was misleading because they “believed that 8GB for £10 per month had not been sufficiently established as the usual selling price.”

Voxi countered that the offer reflected the launch of a new plan. “They said that, to reduce potential consumer confusion, Voxi kept the previous plan at its reference price, 6GB for £10 per month, for 63 days before the launch of the new one,” noted the ASA. But the promotion suggested that 8GB was the usual data allowance, with 12GB representing an advantage for no extra cost.

However, the ASA found that Voxi’s plan had a lot of historic variations and 8GB could thus not be considered as the usual data allowance for £10.

ASA Ruling (REF: A21-1111147 Vodafone Ltd)

Turning therefore to the pricing history for the plan that had been running up to that point and which Vodafone had supplied, we saw that the plan had moved regularly between being on promotion at 12GB (on one occasion, 8GB) for £10 per month, and not being on promotion (6GB for £10 per month) during the period for which Vodafone had supplied figures. When the plan moved to being on promotion, the number of days for which it was on promotion tended to be greater than the number of days for which it was not on promotion (70, 56 and 66 days on promotion compared with 57, 70, 53 and 63 days not on promotion). We considered Vodafone had not established 8GB or 6GB for £10 per month in the previous plan.

We acknowledged that, after the launch of the new plan, Voxi subsequently reduced the amount of data to 8GB per month for £10 after the introductory offer ended. However, there was nothing in the ad to explain what the savings claim was based on or to say the offer was an introductory one.

We considered ads needed to make clear to consumers if a savings claim was being made against a future price. Because the ad did not make clear that the savings claim was being made against a future price, and because Vodafone had not established that 8GB was the usual data allowance for the equivalent previous plan, we concluded that the claim had not been substantiated and that the ad was misleading.

As usual the ASA banned the advert in its current form and told Voxi to “ensure that introductory offers were clearly marked as such.” The ruling may seem fairly unimportant, but we do see quite a lot of broadband ISPs and mobile operators playing a similar game of musical chairs with their weekly price promotions (i.e. it becomes very difficult to know what a package’s true baseline actually is as they’re always on differing ‘offers’).

In an ideal world this ruling might thus discourage such promotions from making misleading claims, but since the ASA rarely uses its powers to punish companies – beyond the approach of encouraging some forgettable bad publicity – then it probably won’t have much long-term impact.