Vodafone ads banned over misleading claims

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The decision from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) follows a complaint from rival telco BT

This week, Vodafone Group has been ordered by the ASA to discontinue a trio of recent ads, with the regulator calling the ads “misleading”

The ads, which were challenged by Vodafone’s rival BT, claim that customers could “switch from BT to Vodafone and get the same broadband for less”.

Vodafone also claimed that “millions of BT customers across the UK are realising they can switch to Vodafone and get the same broadband for less”.

BT said that this claim was untrue, since customers would not receive the same performance on the two networks and that there was no evidence of “millions of BT customers” having switched or preparing to switch to Vodafone’s services.

Vodafone defended its claims by saying that both BT and Vodafone provide services to customers over the same physical network (provided by wholesaler Openreach). The operator also referenced Ofcom’s UK home broadband performance report from 2023 to support its position; this report showed comparable results for the two companies’ 67 Mbps fibre-to-the-cabinet plan.

The ASA rejected this defence, noting that the physical network was only one factor in the overall broadband experience for a customer, discounting things like different router hardware and Wi-Fi technology. It also said the Ofcom report cited did not support the position, given that it only included one of the six broadband plans referenced in Vodafone’s ads and was also related to speeds delivered to the router and not the end customer device.

“Because the claims in the ads would be understood to relate to the full internet connection up to the device, rather than to the router, we considered the data did not support the claims. For those reasons, we considered the comparative data in the Ofcom report did not support the advertising claims as they would be understood by consumers,” said the ASA in their ruling.

“We had not seen evidence which supported claims that BT customers who switched to Vodafone would, in practice, get nearly identical performance, including through the use of nearly identical technology. Therefore, we concluded the claims “the same broadband” and “the same broadband technology” had not been substantiated and were misleading,” the judgement continued.

As a result of the ruling, Vodafone is banned from showing the ads again in their current form.

Misleading claims in telco advertising is certainly nothing new. In the last four years, all of Vodafone’s major rivals – Three, BT (EE), and O2 (now Virgin Media O2) – have had adverts banned by the ASA for making misleading claims about their own services in comparison to that of their rivals.

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