The UK Advertising Standards Authority has announced that they have investigated Coral for a popup ad as well as a targeted email, which generated complaints that the spots were misleading.
The ASA says that an email that promoted a match between England and Wales in June, and offered a £10 free bet if the punter's choice lost, and there was also a popup ad that offered another $10 free bet if players lost a bet when predicting a match score. Those spots had two complaints filed, with punters claiming the spot could be misleading because of certain terms and conditions.
Coral responded to the complaint, noting that the terms of the offer clearly explained that the terms stated the offer was live after 8pm, but did note that they should have put that information in their ads. The ASA ruled that the ads were indeed misleading, as the terms were buried at the bottom of the email and could easily be overlooked. Because of this, the ads were ruled to violate CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1, (Misleading advertising) 3.9, 3.10 (Qualification) and 8.17 and 8.17.1 (Significant conditions for promotions).
Because of this, the ads cannot be sent to punters again in their current form, and Coral must include the terms in conditions for all future offers in a clear and concise way.
Comments
We all know how this spam messages could be so annoying and although this was offering free bets it's still could be irritating to the people who are not interested at all, and of course the misleading part, but from what I read their penalty is just a symbolic one or is there any sanctions at all?
These days you need to think about everything you post, all details, terms etc, as there will always be people that will find your mistakes and will make you answer for that, especially when it is about such thing as gambling, which many people still find scandulous.