A website and poster advertisement for the AA has been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for falsely claiming to be the UK’s largest breakdown provider.
The company’s rival, RAC Motoring Services challenged whether statements like “Join the UK’s No.1” and “the UK’s largest breakdown provider”, were misleading and if they could be substantiated and verified.
The AA responded by stating that they had ‘actively attracted and retained’ more direct members than the RAC, which made them the largest breakdown service provider. The firm came to this conclusion by referring to data for the RAC’s total direct members provided in an investor presentation in March 2021 for the 2020 financial year.
“Based on a market research study conducted in July 2021, which covered December 2020 to March 2021, the AA also said the study found that AA had a 47% share of the direct market compared to 22% by RAC,” the ASA said.
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As well as providing supposed evidence to counteract RAC’s claims, the AA also created a standalone page on its website to ‘facilitate the verification process’ and support the claims that they were “the UK’s largest breakdown service provider”.
Nevertheless the advertising watchdog concluded that a significant amount of time had passed between the dates of the figures quoted and the time the ad was seen in April this year.
The ASA also noted that the link to the standalone page was not provided anywhere in the ads or on their website, deciding that it was not obvious where the information could be found and that consumers would therefore not be able to access that information if they wished to verify the claims.
The authority concluded: “The claims must not appear again in their current forms. We told AA Ltd to ensure that they held adequate evidence to support comparative claims; that the basis of any comparison was presented clearly; and that ads provided sufficient information to enable consumers to verify comparisons with identifiable competitors or signposted consumers to such information.”
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