This story is sponsored by Betfair
An ad for Betfair’s exchange claiming to offer the best prices on horse races 30 minutes before the off has been banned by UK regulator the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for misleading punters.
The TV ad, with on-screen text and voiceover asking “Is Your Bookie Giving You Value?”, claimed to offer better prices than William Hill, Paddy Power and Betfred on all races aired on Channel 4 last September, 30 minutes before they started.
A complainant however challenged that this was misleading, given that William Hill, Paddy Power and Betfred all offered a “Best Odds Guarantee”, which meant their customers would receive whichever was better, the price when they placed their bet or the Starting Price (SP).
Betfair defended the ad by pointing out that the rival bookmakers’ best odds guarantees were not offered to all punters, and that their own comparisons in the ad were based just on the best prices offered by the Betfair exchange 30 minutes before the start of races, “the fairest and most transparent basis for comparison”. The exchange said it could not have provided this comparison based on SP or even 10 or 15 minutes before a race as all bookie prices then tended to converge and move together, if they shifted at all, so there would have been no way to identify differences between the price available on the Betfair exchange and those offered by their fixed-odds competitors.
Vetting body Clearcast said the mechanics underpinning the claim had been agreed some time ago and had subsequently been used by Betfair in several ads. They were satisfied the comparison Betfair offered was “fair and meaningful” and highlighted that the TV ad did not make an absolute “better prices” claim.
The ASA however noted that the restrictions on the bookmakers offering best odds guarantees to their customers which Betfair highlighted were only applied on an ad hoc personal basis. The regulator also held that the comparisons Betfair directed punters to at betchecker.betfair.com were of “limited relevance” given that each of the bookies would have paid out at higher odds if the Starting Price was better than that a customer took online, 30 minutes before the start of the races.
The ASA upheld the complaint and ruled the ad should not appear again in its current form.
Betfair recently repeated the format of the offending ad in the run-up to this year’s Cheltenham festival, claiming to have been better priced than William Hill for 434 of the 483 runners 30 minutes before the start of each race at the 2012 event, and offering greater value than Paddy Power on 426 of these runners.
Article written by Katy Stirland
