ASA judges BT broadband ad was misleading

UK TELECOMS BEHEMOTH British Telecom (BT) has once again fallen afoul of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) with spurious claims about broadband speeds.

In the advert, which is now banned, the firm claimed that it was "rolling out up to 20 meg speeds to give you a consistently faster broadband even at peak times". Competitors and viewers objected that the claim was misleading, with Sky claiming that BT had failed to point out that it operates a traffic management policy.

Talk Talk joined Sky in complaining that BT's speed claim, which was made against data purported to be an "industry average", was not independently obtained. And finally Virgin and Talk Talk said that BT's claims were contradicted by Ofcom's own figures, which the two firms said offered a more "robust" set of results as it was compiled over a longer period of time.

The ASA upheld all of the complaints except for Virgin and Talk Talk's claim that Ofcom's report would have presented a more accurate picture. The regulator said that the report did not take into account BT's 20Mbps service and therefore believed that it was not relevant to the advert.

While BT might have scored a win on that point, the other six complaints were upheld with repeated citations that the ad was misleading, untruthful and breached advertising guidelines.

Perhaps most critical was the ASA's comment on BT's use of data saying, "Because we had not seen sufficient evidence to support the claim that BTs new broadband service was consistently faster than the ADSL industry average even at peak times, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead."

You know things are bad when Sky and Talk Talk are able to claim, correctly, that an advert is essentially a load of old tosh. This is the second time in a month that BT has been caught peddling dodgy claims, though who would have thought that the cringe worthy pair 'Adam and Jane' would tell such porkies?

Perhaps trying out a new damage control strategy, just prior to press time BT's press office was unreachable by telephone due to a "fault" in its line. Now that really is out of order. µ