The Advertising Standards Authority could refuse to investigate ad complaints from rival businesses unless “reasonable steps” have been taken to resolve the dispute first.
The move was first proposed after the watchdog carried out a review of its procedures late last year, in which it originally considered charging companies for complaining about rivals’ ads.
The plan was eventually scrapped, despite its own research which found that complex investigations stemming from competitor complaints took 104 days to resolve, rather than the 65 days taken for standard complaints.
At the time it issued a statement which said: “Our Complaint Handling Procedures require non-public complainants (e.g. competitors) to endeavour to resolve their differences, wherever possible, direct with the marketer or through their trade or professional organisation. We were interested to note from our ‘Waiting time’ analysis that only one of the 19 competitors involved in that analysis appeared to have done that.”
In the some cases rival firms have legal departments scanning rivals’ marketing activity – BSkyB, for instance, is understood to have an entire legal team dedicated to scrutinising Virgin Media’s marketing activity.
This week the ASA has confirmed that complaining businesses will now have to provide documental evidence of how they attempted to resolve disputes.
“In almost all circumstances we would expect a company to have tried to raise their concerns with their competitor before lodging a complaint with us. When they haven’t we will take a view on whether we will reject the complaint,” it said.
The introduction of the new procedure follows a year in which ASA reported a hike in the number of complaints it has had to deal.
ASA also said that it was implementing measures it hopes will reduce the time it takes to complete formal complaint investigations and reported that it had recorded between an 8% increase in the number of complaints that had been dealt with informally in the year up to June 2011, with 72% of complaints ASA receives now been resolved without formal investigations.
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