Vodafone may have won praise in some quarters for gaining market share during the cost of living crisis but it seems this has come at a cost after the mobile phone giant has once again been whacked by the ad watchdog for exaggerating its performance.
In a series of ads – including TV and online executions – devised by OgilvyOne that ran in March and April this year, the company claimed that “millions of BT customers across the UK are realising they can switch to Vodafone and get the same broadband for less. That’s right, the same broadband for less”.
Vodafone also claimed that it offered the “same broadband and landline for less. Same technology, same network – and it’s never been easier to switch. At Vodafone, we use the same technology as BT but we’ll cost you less”.
However, perhaps unsurprisingly, BT rifled off a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority, insisting both claims were misleading and could not be substantiated.
In its defence, Vodafone maintained the purpose of the campaign was to educate consumers that broadband services that were being delivered using the same network technology tended to perform similarly, and that ultimately that could help them save money.
It even cited an Ofcom report, published in March 2023, in which that Ofcom “found few differences between comparable services offered by providers such as BT, EE, Plusnet, Sky and TalkTalk, which use the same Openreach wholesale inputs”.
Vodafone did acknowledge that the report did not use the word “same” to describe broadband performance across providers, but given that Ofcom was of the view that performance was similar, Vodafone considered the wording in the ads was adequate.
The ASA, however, took a different view. It stated: “We considered that consumers would interpret the claims in the ads as having the primary meaning that, in practice, BT customers who switched to Vodafone would get nearly identical broadband performance.
“We expected to see evidence that was the case. However, we also considered the ‘same broadband technology’ claims ascribed the performance to the use of nearly identical technology. We therefore expected to see substantiation that Vodafone’s core network was nearly identical to BT’s in support of those claims, but we had not seen evidence in that regard.”
The ASA has now banned the ads from appearing again in their current form, which given the fact the Vodafone account has now passed to Leo Burnett seems unlikely anyway. However, having already had different ads banned in the past three years, the watchdog warned the company about future activity.
Even so, those customers who did switch from BT to Vodafone on the back of this campaign might well be finding out the hard way that not all advertising is “legal, decent, honest and truthful”.
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