Ad description
The website for MyProtein www.myprotein.com, a sports nutrition retailer, seen on 22 November 2022, featured a banner with text “BLACK FRIDAY UP TO 80% OFF EVERYTHING USE CODE: BLACK”.
Issue
The complainant, who was unable to identify any products on the website that had a saving of more than 5%, challenged whether the claim “Up to 80% off everything” was misleading and could be substantiated.
Response
THG Nutrition Ltd t/a MyProtein said that all products on their website were included in the promotion. They said 12% of all non-clothing products and 12% clothing products had a discount of at least 80%. They also said that 85% of non-clothing products and 63% of clothing products had a discount of between 40% and 80%. They provided a spreadsheet of their data that listed all products from their website at the time of the promotion and showed the discount applied against the product’s RRP.
They said that they could not account for why the largest discount the complainant identified was only 5%. However, it was possible that the discount code had not applied correctly at the checkout.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA considered that consumers would understand the claim “UP TO 80% OFF EVERYTHING” to mean that they would be able to make a genuine saving against the usual selling price of products in the Black Friday sale. We noted that the ad stated that the discount was "OFF EVERYTHING", and therefore consumers would expect that the sale included all products sold by the advertiser. We considered that they would expect a significant proportion of products to be discounted by the full 80%, against the price at which they were usually sold by MyProtein.
We noted from the data that had been provided, that the claimed savings appeared to be based on the RRP of the products. However, we expected to see evidence of the pricing history of the products as sold by MyProtein. Because we did not receive that, we were unable to determine the usual selling price of the products, or whether a significant proportion of them had been reduced by 80% against that price.
Given the above, we concluded the savings claim had not been substantiated and was therefore misleading.
The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 (Misleading advertising), 3.7 (Substantiation) and 3.17 (Prices).
Action
The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told THG Nutrition Ltd t/a MyProtein to ensure they had sufficient evidence for their claims.
