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[Johannesburg, 26 July 2005] -
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ruled that an advert for iTouch Jippii ringtones is misleading and should be withdrawn.Davin Mole, CEO of the Exact Mobile Group, says Exact Mobile filed the complaint with the ASA because consumers were being led to believe the ringtones were available as once-off purchases. In fact, the fine print of the advertisement revealed that by buying a ringtone, they would be joining a subscription service.Mole says it can be extremely difficult for the user to find out which service they are subscribed to, or how to unsubscribe.“Users get caught by the subscription services because users are only notified in the fine print at the bottom of the advert that they are in fact joining a subscription service. However, most users don't read the fine print and therefore think they are purchasing content on a case-by-case basis. When they see someone sending them content on a regular basis and billing them for it, they often send a complaint to our help-desk, but Exact Mobile does not have any subscription services,” he says.To combat the problem, Mole says Exact Mobile filed a complaint with the ASA against cellular subscription services in general.“However, the ASA said we were unable to lay a general complaint and had to pick a specific advert. We therefore filed a complaint against an advert by a subscription service called Jippii, run by iTouch,” he says.The ASA on Friday ruled that the Jippii advert had to be withdrawn with immediate effect on the grounds that it is misleading and must not be used again in its current format.Seeking wider actionMole says Exact Mobile will now send the ruling to the cellular networks and the Wireless Application Service Provider Association (WASPA) and ask them to address the issue of cellular subscription services.“While adverts like the Jippii advert are already illegal according to the WASPA code of conduct, WASPA is only accepting complaints from 1 September 2005, which means advertising is unlikely to change before then. WASPA has said that from 31 July 2005, any user who initiates to a subscription service must be sent an SMS notifying them that it is a subscription service,” Mole says.“However, neither of these take into account the fact that users who have already unknowingly subscribed to subscription services will still be paying for it. We are therefore asking the cellular networks and WASPA to ban this type of advertising, have all such adverts withdrawn across all media forms immediately and force subscription services to unsubscribe all users. The companies could then notify users that their service is a subscription service and ask them whether they want to subscribe to it.”Furthermore, Mole says Exact Mobile wants WASPA to force all subscription services to send a monthly message to all their users reminding them that they are subscribed and telling them how they can unsubscribe. “That way if a user does not realise they have subscribed to a service, they have the option to get out of it.”
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