Advertising authority rules against Tiscali

By Alun Williams

Posted on 24 Jul 2003 at 12:34

The ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) has ruled in Freeserve's favour over a complaint lodged against one of its rival ISPs, Tiscali.

At question was a direct mailing from Tiscali, a year ago, involving the claims that it was 'Europe's leading ISP' and had 'over 3 million UK members'. On both counts the official body decided 'complaint upheld'.

On the first issue - 'leading ISP' - Tiscali was basing the claim on the fact that it operated in 13 different companies, which was more than their competitors. And while not being the largest ISP, their service, nonetheless, was available to the largest number of people by a clear margin.

The ASA, however, decided that people would understand the claim to mean it simply had the largest number of subscribers. On this basis the claim was deemed misleading and the advertiser told to remove it.

On the second claim - '3 million UK members' - Tiscali defended the figure as the people with Tiscali accounts who could potentially use Tiscali for Internet access (without an additional sign-up procedure or opening a new account). This included members who had opened accounts with acquired ISP's (for example LineOne), which had subsequently been re-branded as Tiscali. Furthermore, Tiscali maintained that 'no universally accepted definition of member or active-user existed'.

This wasn't found as being reasonable by the ASA because 'readers would not consider persons with only 'webmail' access to be subscribers to the advertisers' service, and because readers would infer that the number of members was the number of subscribers to the advertisers' service'. It asked Tiscali not to repeat the claim.

Tiscali for its part has issued a brusque response, stating that the ruling - as it involved a campaign run last year - was irrelevant to its current advertising. In an official statement, the company adds 'The ASA did not like our definition of "members" but we stand by our data, and as the only ISP operating in 14 countries across Europe, we are the only truly pan-European ISP.'

You can find the full ASA ruling on the Freeserve complaint here.

Freeserve is not backwards at coming forwards when it comes to such industry disputes - check out the recent run-ins with AOL and BT.