'Misleading' Betfair ads banned in UK
Betfair has had an advertising campaign banned by UK advertising watchdog the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for being "likely to mislead."
BETFAIR HAS had an advertising campaign banned by UK advertising watchdog the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for being “likely to mislead.”
The betting exchange has been forced to stop running two billboard adverts which claimed that the returns available to consumers taking Betfair’s Starting Price (SP), the odds available at the start of each race, were on average 40% better than those taking the industry SP.
Pressure group Straight Statistics challenged the claim as misleading and said that it could not be substantiated “ a complaint that the ASA has upheld.
The claim surrounds Betfair’s own SP, the ‘Betfair SP’ (BSP), which was launched in December 2007.
Betfair compared the BSP with the industry SP on each of the 17,000-odd horses raced in Britain and Ireland since the BSP was launched, and observed that if a gambler had placed a £10 stake on all racing horses at the BSP, they would have been £460,817 better off than making the same bets at the industry SP; a difference of 41%.
The UK company said the claim of ‘40% better SP’ used in the advert was based on that average, but was not intended to guarantee that Betfair customers would, in every case, receive returns at BSP which were at least 40% better than those available from the industry SP.
It maintained that the claim would be seen as an average by consumers, who would understand that sometimes the returns available from the BSP would be less than 40% better than the industry SP, sometimes more than 40% better.
An ASA adjudication agreed that “Betfair’s argument that the claim ‘40% better SP’ would be understood by consumers as a factual statement of the average difference between the BSP and industry SP,” and acknowledged that “the comparison of SP and BSP odds for winning horses sent by Betfair demonstrated the accuracy of the average difference between the two”.
However, it also noted that the advert “was not qualified in any way” and “considered that consumers were likely to infer that such a figure was typical of what they could expect when betting at the BSP, although”¦ consumers were unlikely to expect that to be the case in all instances”.
It continued: “Betfair’s data demonstrated that a significant majority of winners had a significantly lower difference between BSP and the industry SP.”
Around 3,000 of the total 17,000 bets, or just under a fifth, had a BSP either the same or worse than the industry SP; around 12,000 of the 17,000 (nearly three quarters) had a BSP that was only 20% better or less; and only around 2,000, or just over a tenth, actually had a BSP that was 40% better or more.
On those figures, the watchdog concluded that “the basic average figure used by Betfair was skewed due to the influence of winners with very long odds, which tended to have a disproportionately higher difference between BSP and SP. Because we considered that Betfair had not shown that the average figure they used was typically representative of the difference between the BSP and SP, we considered that the claim was likely to mislead”.
Betfair is not the first operator to fall foul of the ASA, with Intercasino and Paddy Power, Ladbrokes and William Hill all having received ASA ad bans within the last few months.
Betfair was not available for comment at the time of writing.
In other company news on EGRmagazine.com this week, Betfair saved £1.65m in 18 months by dropping its recruitment agencies and hiring direct.