Ad description
A website for Livedrive, an online backup for computer files, www.livedrive.com, seen on 23 August 2015, described the services they offered.
Issue
A complainant, who understood that the standard back-up option could back-up one user account only, challenged whether the claim "Backup your whole PC or Mac" was misleading and could be substantiated.
Response
Livedrive Internet Ltd confirmed that a customer could back up all the files on their Windows or Mac computer if they had one operating system user account, or if the admin user account on their operating system had access to all the files stored on other user accounts on the same computer. For privacy and security reasons, they considered that, if the owner of the computer did not have access to the other user accounts, they should not be able to back up the other users' files to the owner's Livedrive account. Livedrive did not believe there was a straightforward way of explaining that in the ad and were not aware of the issue having been of concern to other customers.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA noted that the ad described the service as "Unlimited online backup - Backup your whole PC or Mac, no matter how many files you've got". The ad showed desktop computers and personal devices. We considered the ad suggested that there would be no limit to the number of files that a subscriber to the service would be able to back up. We considered it was not unreasonable or unlikely, however, for desktop computers to have multiple users in a household and that, if the claim applied to one operating system user account only, the ad needed to make that clear. Because it did not, we concluded that it was likely to mislead.
The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules
3.1
3.1
Marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so.
and
3.3
3.3
Marketing communications must not mislead the consumer by omitting material information. They must not mislead by hiding material information or presenting it in an unclear, unintelligible, ambiguous or untimely manner.
Material information is information that the consumer needs to make informed decisions in relation to a product. Whether the omission or presentation of material information is likely to mislead the consumer depends on the context, the medium and, if the medium of the marketing communication is constrained by time or space, the measures that the marketer takes to make that information available to the consumer by other means.
(Misleading advertising) and
3.7
3.7
Before distributing or submitting a marketing communication for publication, marketers must hold documentary evidence to prove claims that consumers are likely to regard as objective and that are capable of objective substantiation. The ASA may regard claims as misleading in the absence of adequate substantiation.
(Substantiation).
Action
The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Livedrive to ensure that future ads did not claim or suggest that their product offered back up of all the files on a computer if that was not the case.
