It’s almost comical at this point how often the ASA seems to be stepping in to ban Betfair advertisements. In fact, it has become so commonplace that Betfair might as well start putting odds up in their commercials, “will this commercial be banned by the ASA”?
When you look at the Adjudication process by the UK Advertising Standards Authority ASA, it makes sense, but you can’t help but feel that they are nit-picking a bit. Here’s a sample of adjudication process taken directly from the ASA’s website in reference to the most recently banned Betfair commercial:
“The ASA noted ad (a) stated “On average you’re 40% better off on the Betfair SP” and considered that most consumers would interpret this as a claim that customers would typically be 40% better off on the BSP than they would have been had they taken the industry SP. We considered that most consumers would understand that this 40% figure was calculated based on the average difference between the SP and BSP from all of the previous days races and would not assume that on each race they would have been 40% better off on the BSP than the SP. We also noted the ad included some of the previous days races which showed a sample of the differences in starting prices and showed that on some occasions the BSP was lower than the SP and on other occasions it was considerably higher.
However, we noted that the 40% average figure used by Betfair was based on all of the previous days winners and was influenced by winners with very long odds, which tended to have a disproportionately high difference between the BSP and SP. We therefore considered that the mean average figure was not a typical representation of the percentage difference between the SP and the BSP because it was not attainable by readers unless they bet on every race. Because we considered that Betfair had not shown that 40% was typically representative of the difference between the BSP and SP, we considered that the claim was likely to mislead.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I tend to think that if you scrutinize the shit out of most commercials you’ll find something a little misleading.
