Bald truth bans hair transplant ad

The ad watchdog has finally pulled the rug from under hair transplant specialists after it banned a TV ad for one firm which claimed it could transform a slaphead into a Barry Gibb lookalike within weeks.
The TV spot for Ziering Medical UK launched on Channel 5, and opened with overhead shots of three follically challenged men. “When I started losing my hair,” the voiceover began, “I started losing my confidence. I searched everywhere, but just couldn’t find an answer. Then a friend told me about hair transplant surgery from Ziering…”
The scene switched to overhead shots of three similar looking men in similar locations, with similar clothes and hair colouring to the first three, but with hair more luxuriant than you would normally see in a L’Oreal ad. Meanwhile, the commentary continued: “I started to see results in just four months.”
However, the claims led one C5 viewer to seek out the bald truth from the Advertising Standards Authority. He did not believe that the before and after comparisons in the top-down shots were genuine, and challenged whether the ad was misleading.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ziering said it did not consider the ad misleading, arguing that it represented a “visual representation” of the results of hair transplant surgery, the voiceover “encompassed the thoughts and feelings of patients following surgery”.
Even Clearcast, the body which vets TV ads before airing, believed that the images were representative of what might be achievable to a typical consumer for this type of service.
The ASA, however, was not quite so gullible as Ziering had failed “to provide robust evidence to demonstrate patients generally obtained results akin to those shown in the ad”, and concluded that the ad was misleading.
The ruling also noted that two characters in the “after” shots “appeared to have thicker hair over their whole heads. This could not be achieved by hair transplantation because [it] redistributed hair follicles and did not create them or affect the thickness of the hair strands.”