Virgin Media has had its wrist-slapped or, more accurately, received a good hiding from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) over a controversial advertising campaign. Neil Hawkins, contributing editor Choose.net looks at how the broadband price wars are taking are getting nasty…
The campaign to ‘stop the broadband con’ was introduced late last year and sought to shed light on the marketing of broadband speeds by broadband providers.
Virgin Media slated its competitors for spreading what it called, “widespread dissatisfaction among consumers about the advertising of broadband speeds.”
However, it turned out that there was plenty of dissatisfaction about Virgin’s own advert and eight separate complaints from rivals Sky and BT were upheld against it, including: misleading advertising, exaggeration, imitation and denigration.
That’s an impressive haul for a single advertising campaign and the irony of an advert which stated, “You deserve the truth from all ISPs and we’re urging the Advertising Standards Authority to put a stop to misleading broadband advertising once and for all…” subsequently suffering censure is too sweet.
The main problem with Virgin Media’s campaign was that it tried to paint as black and white an issue more multi-faceted than one of Naomi Campbell’s diamonds.
When it first appeared, Virgin Media’s rallying cries to, “stop the broadband con!” left a lot of industry analysts scratching their heads thinking, “which one?”
Is it the use of the fastest possible theoretical speed in all broadband adverts, even if this speed cannot be reached by anyone on the network, as long as it is prefixed by the ubiquitous ‘up to’?
Or perhaps it is the use of the term ‘unlimited downloads’, which never seems to be very far from some incredibly small print stating that ‘traffic management and fair use policies apply.’
The serious point buried somewhere inside here is that almost all broadband providers and certainly Virgin Media themselves, are guilty of one offence telling white lies and making sweeping generalisations.
Sky and BT both run on copper networks (by the way, Virgin Media has one too, it likes to keep it under the stairs) and as a result have to advertise their connections as ‘up to xMb’.
Virgin Media on the other hand, with its cable fibre-based network, can claim that most customers will receive a speed almost exactly that which was advertised but, not only have BT and others begun to offer fibre broadband packages, Virgin Media also operates one of the harshest traffic management policies in the industry.
This means that users who exceed fairly small download and upload limits in a given period of time are going to be ‘throttled’ and suffer in terms of broadband speed.
There are plenty of people who would step forward and call that regime a ‘broadband con’.
Most would however agree with the general thrust behind Virgin Media’s claims. Yes, the marketing of broadband, particularly speed, is a difficult thing and highly competitive, but it is not easy nor is it practical to convey accurately and succinctly what speed new connections will run at, how much can be downloaded and at what time of day.
What this episode really tells us I suppose, is that the ASA themselves are the party who need to pull their fingers out of the RJ45 socket and do something useful.
When you are having to point out the flaws in an ad campaign which aims to point out the flaws in other ad campaigns you know that somewhere along the line, you’ve let the situation get slightly out of control.
This is a guest post from Choose. The site covers rights issues, research and debate into home broadband and more broadly home media and mobile markets.
