An advert touting the services of a heating company has been labelled as misleading by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
In the ruling, published today (7 August), the ASA said the promotion from Fischer Future Heat UK must not appear again in its current form.
A leaflet seen by the complainant in April 2019 promised a 10-year warranty for heating systems fitted by the company and said any installation which could not heat customers’ homes to 21 degrees Celsius would be replaced free of charge. It additionally promised customers 1000 kWh of free electricity.
The terms and conditions contained a number of important qualifiers, including that customers must be supplied by Fischer’s energy retail arm to be eligible for the free electricity. They said the heat guarantee would not apply for rooms with an open vent or chimney.
However, the complainant said the size and colour of the text, being small and grey, made it difficult to read. They claimed the advert was therefore misleading.
Fischer blamed a design error for the text being grey, saying it should have been black instead.
But the company said font size was “standard” for terms and conditions and provided examples from other advertisers. It argued the text was large enough for “the majority and the average person” to read and said it was impossible to make it legible for everyone because a minority of people have serious sight problems.
Despite Fischer’s response, the ASA has decided to uphold the ruling.
It said the small print contained a number of “significant conditions that would impact on a consumer’s transactional decision to make further enquiries about Fischer’s heaters”.
The ASA acknowledged Fischer’s assertion that the colour of the font was the result of an error. However, it also noted that the text and graphics in the rest of the advert did not appear faded and that the size of font was very small by comparison.
Furthermore, the ASA found the conditions listed in the advert were linked via asterisks or footnote numbers to different claims spread across both sides of the leaflet and did not follow a logical numerical order.
It accepted that customers could take as much time as needed to read the advert but said the combination of factors described above would make it difficult for people with average eyesight to do so.