Officials: Carrier claims that network voice service is “unbeatable” are not substantiated
A recent print and Web advertising campaign by Vodafone makes claims about the carrier’s U.K. voice service that the Advertisement Standards Authority this week banned.
Specifically, Vodafone marketing materials boasted that, “Our network is unbeatable at connecting calls …”
According to the ASA, “consumers were likely to interpret the claims as top parity ones, which meant that Vodafone was as good as other [mobile network operators] in respect of performance on call connection and dropped calls. We expected to see robust evidence to support the claims.”
That evidence was apparently not forthcoming as evidenced in the ASA’s final judgment.
“The ads must not appear again in their current form,” ASA ruled. “We told Vodafone … not to imply they performed as well as other mobile network operators on call connection and dropped calls performance across the U.K. coverage unless they held suitable substantiation.”
For its part, Vodafone explained that the ad campaign was based on comparing its call performance data against similar data from rival Three, O2 and EE; the data was collected from November 2013 to April 2014 in 26 town and cities in the U.K.
“They considered the cities and towns covered in the sample helped to ensure a true representation of call connection and dropped calls performance across the U.K.,” the regulators wrote. “That data was then subjected to a statistical analysis by a separate independent organization to prove or disprove,” the claims.
Test sites including the West Midlands, London and West Yorkshire, while large swatches of Wales, Northern Ireland and most of Scotland were not included.
Essentially, the advertising regulators accused Vodafone of picking its test locations to get the desired results.
