Specsavers national press campaign banned by ASA
A national press campaign for Specsavers Optical Group has been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority for being ‘misleading’.
The campaign received a complaint from a dispensing optician who challenged the claim that ‘some opticians charge extra for digital retinal photography. At Specsavers, we don’t.’
Text running underneath this headline claimed that ‘many opticians’ made customers pay for a ‘normal’ eye test, then pay again for digital retinal photography, a process the advert said that the brand believed ‘as many people as possible’ should have access to.
The complaint claimed that this implied that digital retinal photography (DRP) was the latest technology and that it had been superseded by Spectral Domain Optical Coherence Tomography (SDOCT).
Specsavers said that the DRP technology and SDOCT technology were separate and differing technologies and that OCT had been around for 20 years. The company said that it used a Non-Mydriatic Auto Fundus Camera which took high resolution photographic images to carry out eye tests, which it believed was the latest technology, however the ASA upheld the complaint.
The ASA said that it understood that there were different methods to retina scans and that there were some SDOCT machines that also took digital retina photographs and that while Specsavers were right that OCT has come before DRP, it was understood that more optometric practices than DRP had become available.
As a result it found that the advert was misleading.