Virgin Media in Advertising Rap
Dan Drage dan@consumerchoices.co.uk
Virgin Media’s ‘Hate to Wait’ campaign has been heavily criticised by the ASA for misleading customers on expected speeds. (02-07-08).
The complainant, BT (www.bt.com), claimed Virgin Media’s (www.virginmedia.com) ‘Hate to Wait’ advertising campaign which featured download times for songs and TV shows was misleading. In the light of Virgin Media’s service capping activity, download speeds during peak times would be significantly slower than advertised.
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"Virgin Media did admit to one fatal flaw in their advertising campaign; they confused ‘megabits’ with ‘megabytes’ in the text"
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The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld BT’s complaint and ordered Virgin Media to make it implicitly clear download speeds may vary.
In its published investigation of the matter, the ASA concluded the media campaign failed to make it clear customers on Virgin Media's lower speed packages would only be able to download TV shows at the speeds advertised during off-peak hours.
In response, Virgin Media were quick to point out that those on lower speed packages would only have to wait a few minutes more for songs and TV shows to download than those with an advanced service.
The ISP was forced to concede customers would be subject to its traffic management system however, known throughout broadband discussion forums as ‘throttling’.
In a statement, Virgin Media outlined the difference of opinion between the ASA and itself:
“We believe our Hate to Wait campaign provided a simple and transparent comparison between broadband speeds for consumers looking to choose between Virgin Media's M, L and XL broadband packages.”
Virgin Media did admit to one fatal flaw in their advertising campaign; they confused ‘megabits’ with ‘megabytes’ in the text.
This will now be amended, along with the message in all subsequent Virgin Media campaigns.
Michael Phillips, Product Director at Broadband Choices, had the following to say:
“Putting the issue of miss-selling to one side for a moment, for an ISP with the magnitude of Virgin Media to confuse megabits with megabytes in a major national media campaign is embarrassing for them to say the least”
He continues:
“Broadband Choices has been campaigning for transparency in broadband advertising for some time, so we see this ruling as something of a result. As each ISP runs an advertising campaign with misleading information in it, the authenticity and integrity of an already cloudy industry is brought into disrepute a little more.”
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