Most of the adverts that run into trouble on television aren’t trying to mislead anybody. They’ve used a line that sounded perfectly reasonable in a meeting, and nobody stopped to ask what it would take to prove it.
The principle behind the rules is easy enough to state. If you say something that viewers will take as a fact, you need evidence for it, and you need it before the advert goes out, because Clearcast will ask for it when it checks the script. That still leaves you free to say a great deal, and most of the skill lies in knowing which lines will be heard as facts. The detail is set out in the part of the broadcast advertising code that deals with misleading claims, and these are the kinds of line that most often cause problems.
Opinions and facts
There’s a difference between an obvious bit of salesmanship and a statement of fact. The rules allow for exaggeration that nobody would take literally, so a café can say it serves the best coffee in town without anybody demanding the figures.
The trouble starts when a line sounds measurable. “The best coffee in town” is an opinion, whereas “the best value coffee in town” starts to sound like something you could check, and “voted the best coffee in town” certainly is. The closer a claim gets to something that could be tested, the more likely you’ll be asked to prove it.
What settles it is how a viewer is likely to take the line, which isn’t always what the advertiser meant by it, and that’s why a factual claim can’t be turned into an opinion by the way it’s presented. Putting it in quotation marks, or opening with “we think”, makes no difference if what the viewer hears is still something that could be checked. The same goes for a claim made by a customer, because a testimonial saying that your boiler cut somebody’s gas bill by a third is treated as the advert saying so, and it needs the same proof. We’ve written more about that in our article on using real customers.
“Number one”
The clearest case of a boast that turns out to be a fact is “number one”, and it catches people out because it feels so harmless. The ASA’s advice on “number one” claims says that they will almost always be treated as a factual comparison, and viewers usually take them to mean best-selling. So you’d need sales figures for the whole market, not only your own, and they’d have to compare like with like. That advice was written for adverts in other media, but the television code asks for evidence in the same way, and a word like “leading” is read in much the same light.
If the whole market is more than you can prove, there’s usually a narrower claim that you can. A line that rests on a particular survey, an award or a review score can be perfectly acceptable, provided the advert says what it’s based on and it’s still true on the day the advert goes out.
“Cheapest” and “lowest prices”
The other claim that nearly everybody would like to make is about price, and price claims are looked at closely, because they’re exactly the kind of thing people act on. To say you’re the cheapest, you need to show that you beat your competitors, and matching them isn’t enough. A price promise, where you refund the difference if somebody finds it cheaper elsewhere, doesn’t by itself entitle you to say your prices are the lowest, and the ASA’s advice on lowest price claims treats the two as different things.
Time makes this harder on television than it looks. A campaign can be on air for weeks, your competitors can change their prices overnight, and the claim has to stay true for as long as the advert is running. That’s why a promise to match or beat a price is often an easier line to live with than a flat statement that nobody is cheaper.
Savings and “was” prices need the same care. If the advert says “half price”, there has to be a real, recent price that it’s half of, and one the product was on sale at for long enough to count as its usual price. With “up to half price”, a fair share of what’s in the sale has to carry the full discount, because the code says that a claim like that mustn’t exaggerate what’s really available. Monthly payments and credit bring a further set of rules, and we’ve covered those in a separate article on finance offers.
Naming a competitor
A claim to be the cheapest compares you with everybody at once, but you can also pick out a single rival. You’re allowed to compare yourself with a named competitor, and it can make for very effective advertising. The comparison has to be fair, though, which means comparing like with like, on something that can be checked, without running the other company down.
You don’t have to use their name for those rules to apply. If viewers can work out who “the other supermarket” is, it counts as a comparison with that competitor, and in a local market with only two or three firms in it, almost any “better than the rest” line points at somebody. A competitor has every reason to go through your figures, and is as free to complain to the ASA as any viewer, so if there’s any doubt about whether a comparison stands up, it’s much better to find out when it’s a line in a script.
Green claims
Environmental claims are a newer source of trouble, and words like “eco-friendly”, “sustainable” and “greener” are under more scrutiny than they’ve ever been. The code’s rules on environmental claims say the basis of the claim has to be clear, and that it should take account of the whole life of the product unless the advert says otherwise. So a sweeping line about being good for the planet has to hold all the way from manufacture to disposal, and a word like “greener” or “kinder” has to make clear what the comparison is with.
Persil found that out in 2022, when an advert describing the product as “kinder to our planet” was banned after a single complaint. What tends to work is to say exactly what you’ve done, such as moving to recycled packaging or making your deliveries by electric van, because a specific change is something you can prove, and it’s usually more convincing than an adjective in any case.
Health claims
Health is the other area where a general-sounding line needs something specific behind it. Anything that suggests a product is good for you comes with its own set of rules, especially for food and drink, where health and nutrition claims have to come from an official list of authorised ones. General lines like “full of goodness” need a specific, authorised claim alongside them, which is where an advert for Special K came unstuck. We’ve told both that story and Persil’s in our article on banned adverts. If you sell food or drink, the rules on products high in fat, salt or sugar may apply as well.
The small print can’t undo the headline
It’s tempting to assume that any of these lines can be made safe with small print, and that a bold claim can be put right by some text at the bottom of the screen. The text is there to clarify an offer, though, by giving the date a sale ends or the stores taking part, for instance, and it isn’t allowed to contradict what the advert has just said. When a condition changes the meaning of the headline, it’s the headline that has to change. We’ve written a separate guide to how that small print works.
Where we come in
None of this means your advert has to be cautious or dull, only that the strongest line in it should be one you can stand behind. When we write a script, we look at each claim in it the way Clearcast will, and we’ll tell you what evidence is going to be asked for. Quite often there’s a way of saying the same thing that’s just as persuasive and much easier to support. The earlier we know what you can prove the better, because a plain fact, such as the number of years you’ve been trading or an award you’ve really won, will often do more for you than the superlative it replaces. If you’d like to talk an idea through, get in touch.
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