The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld two complaints made against Ageas Retail Ltd (trading as RIAS).

A direct mailing for RIAS, seen in November 2015, promoted home insurance. Text stated, Your renewal: December 2015 … 3 great reasons to choose Rias”.

The complainant, who had asked for their personal information to be suppressed and not to receive marketing communications from the advertiser, challenged whether the ad breached the Code because they had asked not to receive marketing communications from the advertiser and had been assured that their details had been suppressed; and whether the claim “Your renewal: December 2015” misleadingly implied that they had an existing insurance policy with the advertiser when that wasn’t the case.

Ageas Retail admitted that RIAS had suffered a failure of their primary suppressions process in March 2015. That failure, caused by the removal of a Post Office address file check, meant that some suppression requests had not been processed, and as a result 980 consumers were sent marketing communications after they had requested that their details be suppressed. They said they acted promptly once they knew there was an issue and in December 2015, before being contacted by the ASA, all marketing activity had been suspended until they could be confident that they had correctly applied all requests for suppressions to each marketing campaign file.

They said email campaigns were stopped for 14 days while files were checked and reloaded. All direct mail campaigns were held at the mailing house for a week and manually sorted to remove any mailings to consumers who had asked for their details to be suppressed. In addition, their outbound contact centre was closed for two days while their files were manually checked.

The ASA understood from information provided by the complainant that RIAS had advised them that their details had been added to a suppression list in March 2015 to prevent marketing communications being sent to them, and that the suppression could take 60 days to come into effect. However, the complainant had received further marketing communications, including the ad in this case, which was received in November 2015.

The ad watchdog acknowledged that the suppression failure was unfortunate and that RIAS had suspended marketing activity on realising the failure had occurred, and subsequently put processes in place to prevent the issue re-occurring. Nevertheless, the ASA was concerned that RIAS had not complied with the requirements of the CAP Code that marketing communications should not be sent to consumers who had asked not to receive them, and that consumers were entitled to have their personal information suppressed. In light of that, the ASA concluded that the ad had breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 10.4, 10.4.4 and 10.5 (Database practice).

Regarding whether the claim made was misleading, the ASA noted that text at the top of the ad stated, “Your renewal: December 2015”, and considered that, when read in isolation, the claim was ambiguous. It considered that the claim was prominent within the ad, and that consumers were likely to understand from it that the letter referred to a policy they had with the advertiser which was about to expire.

The ASA said it also noted that text in the body of the ad, such as “You could bring down the cost of your home insurance … So if your renewal is due in December, now’s the perfect time to protect your home …” suggested that the letter was from a prospective insurer, and implied that the advertiser might be able to offer a better deal than the complainant’s current supplier. However, the ASA considered that that text was insufficient to alter the impression created by the text at the top of the letter; namely, that it referred to an ongoing policy they held with RIAS. It therefore concluded that the claim “Your renewal: December 2015” was misleading, breaching CAP Code (Edition 12) rule 3.1 (Misleading advertising).

Ageas Retail was told by the ASA to ensure that marketing communications were not sent to consumers who had asked not to receive them, and that they complied with the Code’s requirement that consumers were entitled to have their personal information suppressed. Further, the ASA told them to ensure they did not imply that a consumer had an existing policy with them, when that was not the case.