Sky Digital's customer claim gets short shrift from advertising body

The Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland (ASAI) yesterday said a claim by Sky Digital that it was attracting 1,000 new Irish customers a week to its digital TV service was misleading.

The ASAI upheld a complaint by cable and digital TV provider, NTL Ireland against a British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) advertising campaign which ran during the first quarter of the year. It ran a radio campaign stating that it was recruiting 1,000 customers weekly to Sky Digital, while its TV adverts stated that it was signing up four-out-of-five Irish households that were switching to digital. NTL said the claim was misleading. Figures for this year show both it and BSkyB signed up 7,000 digital customers each during the first quarter of the year.

Sky was relying on figures showing that it signed up 52,000 new customers last year, and that a report by communications regulator, ComReg in March, which showed it had 272,000 out 337,000 digital subscribers.

The ASAI upheld the claim on the basis that figures were out of date. It said recent data showed there was "parity between thenumber of new subscribers to NTL and to Sky for digital services".

"While the evidence submitted would appear to support a claim that four out of the five households in Ireland that have gone digital have chosen Sky, it does not reflect the current situation among consumers who are now going digital," it said.

"Similarly the advertising claim in relation to an average 1,000 new customers every week was in respect of past performance during 2002 as a whole.

"As newer data is now available, the claim should either be specifically stated to be in respect of a particular period of should be reviewed in light of the most recent data."

NTL yesterday welcomed the ASAI's decision. BSkyB's spokesperson was not available to comment.