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ASA Virgin Media Sky

Sky ad banned following Virgin complaint over network reliability claims

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By Natalie Mortimer, N/A

April 1, 2015 | 2 min read

Sky has been told by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that it must remove an advert on its website containing claims over its broadband reliability following a complaint from Virgin Media.

The rival provider approached the ad watchdog after it raised concerns that Sky's ad misleadingly implied that the reliability of a consumer's complete broadband service was 99.9 per cent, when Virgin understood that Sky's core network only handled a small proportion of the data flow required to download online content or access a web page.

Sky said that the ad clearly stated the factors other than Sky's network that would affect customers' overall reliability and said that it did not believe that consumers would overlook this explanation as it was stated in the body of the ad and linked by the asterisks to the main claim.

However the ASA said that as the headline claim was prominently placed in the ad, and it did not feel the wording of the qualifying text adequately clarified that the headline claim did not apply to significant parts of the overall connection, therefore the ad was deemed misleading.

It must not appear again in its current form.

ASA Virgin Media Sky

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