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BT Broadband broadbanned! Advertising watchdogs have vetoed a BT Home Hub advert that tried to blame your Wi-Fi problems on your phone.
“There’s no end of things around the home that can disrupt your wireless Internet,” burbles the now-banned advert, followed by shots of mobile phones and radios. Look at those fiendish mobile phones and radios, whispers BT between the lines; look at them, the little sneaks, interrupting your Internets, the dastardly blackguards!
Except, of course, they’re doing nothing of the kind, as three viewers pointed out. “Using (mobile phones) for telephone calls would not cause interference of the kind described,” ruled the Advertising Standards Authority as it bans the ad. “We further noted that the ad also featured images of radios, which Ofcom had also advised did not pose a particular problem in terms of interference.”
Update: “The ASA found that the advert was clear that certain household devices can cause interference with Wi-Fi,” counters BT, “but they considered that the items chosen to illustrate this were not the ones most likely to cause an issue. We are reviewing our legal sign-off processes to ensure that creative visuals accurately reflect our substantiation in future TV ads.”
In case you’re wondering, the non-Wi-Fi devices most likely to interfere with your wireless Internet are, according to telecoms watchdog Ofcom, baby monitors and video senders. Oh, and possibly microwaves.
Now if the folks at the ASA can just get on with banning those awful BT flatmates we’d be very grateful, or at the very least unplugging their Internet and boarding up the flat in question.
This isn’t the first broadband ad ban we’ve seen lately: a cringe-worthy Sky ad featuring Bruce Willis in a bathrobe was banned over misleading claims about the true cost of Sky broadband, while BT was up to its old tricks with a BT Infinity ad yanked for claiming speeds 8 times faster than the average.
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