ASA upholds complaint against Cadbury’s competition
The Advertising Standards Authority has upheld a complaint by the winner of a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk competition to win London Olympic tickets after the prize was subsequently withheld.
Hosted on the Daily Mirror website the competition ran with the strapline ‘Win London 2012 men’s 100 metre final tickets’ and required entrants to correctly guess how many Cadbury Dairy Milk bars it would take to match the weight of a shot put.
The winner however was not given the stated prize due to a short response period that was not made clear, causing unnecessary disappointment.
A joint venture between Trinity Mirror and Kraft Foods, which now owns the Cadburys brand, the competition was run by the pairs PR company.
However a breakdown in communication meant that Trinity failed to reference the dates by which the prize needed to be claimed in the terms and conditions, sowing the seeds of later confusion. Trinity subsequently phoned the winner multiple times as the deadline was about to expire warning her that the prize would be forfeit.
In their assessment the ASA said: “We recognised that some prizes, such as event tickets, were time specific and might therefore require a short deadline by which winners should claim their prize. We noted that in this instance the prize was time specific but neither the ad nor the terms and conditions specified that winners must claim their prize by a particular date.
“We understood that the complainant was not available during 19 and 20 July because of a family situation, but checked her e-mails morning and night, and did not receive an e-mail from TM until 11.23 am on 20 July. She confirmed that she had received four missed calls across both days but that all of those were from withheld numbers so she was unable to respond. She also reported that no voicemails were left.
“We acknowledged that due to the nature of the prize, the competition would not be repeated. However, we told both Trinity Mirror and Kraft Foods to ensure that a date by which winners must claim their prize was included in their ads for any future prize promotions.”