Complaints about advertising upheld

COMPLAINTS ABOUT weight-loss claims, mobile phone offers and car adverts were among those upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority in its latest bulletin.

Its complaints committee upheld 15 of the 20 cases it examined. Three of the 20 cases came from the authority’s monitoring programme. One such case involved press advertising for Tony Quinn slimming products. One advertisement claimed a woman had lost 31 lb (14kg) with Mr Quinn’s weight loss system. Another claimed a product could shrink the user’s waist.

The authority wrote to Mr Quinn seeking substantiation for the claims made. The company said all testimonials featured genuine customer statements and said the products were not required to undergo individual testing to bear claims as they were food products. The complaint was upheld.

The committee did not uphold a complaint about an advertisement for the Red Bull energy drink, but expressed concern about it. The cartoon advert showed a boy feeding Red Bull to pigs. He then went to his mother and begged for her permission to go to what was described as “a gentlemen’s club”. She said he could do this “when pigs fly”. The pigs were then seen flying past the kitchen window.

The advertisement ended with the boy leaning on the stage, watching a dancer at the club.

Complaints suggested the caricature of the child was unsuitable and inappropriate and objected to the portrayal of women.

The committee did not consider the majority of the advertisements to be in breach of the advertising code, but said the scene depicting the boy in the club was “in conflict with the spirit of the code”.

A complaint on a Ford press advert was upheld. It featured a hatchback car with the headline: “Turn scrappage into precious metal. Get €4,000 off a new Ford Fiesta, now just €11,700.” The terms and conditions stated the car was shown for photographic purposes only. The complainant said the advert was misleading, because the car featured was not related to the price in the offer.