Envenio t/a The Casting Suite – ASA Informal Adjudication 20J un 07

[Joe Rispoli]

Informal ASA Adjudication dated 20 June 2007
Envenio t/a The Casting Suite
1 Dean’s Yard
London
SW1 P 3NP
Case number: A07-21671
Media: Leaflet
Sector: Employment
Number of complaints: 1
Ad
A leaflet, for a casting agency, was headlined “The entertainment agency needs people” and stated “Envenio has over 5000 registered clients in the entertainment industry who look for models, actors and extras”
Issue
The complainant challenged the claim “Envenio has over 5000 registered clients in the entertainment industry”.
Response
Envenio provided their registered client list which included the name, company and e-mail address for each client as well as their username and password for the Envenio website. There were over 5,000 names on the list.
Envenio said they had no plans to use the ad again.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA noted the client list included over 5,000 names. However, we noted some of the names were not attributed to a specific company and in some cases several names were listed-for the same company, for example over 300 names were listed for the BBC and over 100 for a leading ad agency. In addition a few names were listed under Envenio s trading name The Casting Suite.
We contacted twenty of the listed clients via e-mail. Although we received eight responses from people on the list who confirmed that they were registered clients of Envenio, eight of the e-mails were undeliverable and two respondents said they had never been clients of Envenio. We therefore concluded that although some of the people on the list were genuine registered clients, several contacts may have been out of date, or been added even though they had not agreed to register with Envenio.
We considered that Envenio had failed to provide sufficient evidence to substantiate the claim “over 5000 registered clients” and we concluded, therefore, that the claim was likely to mislead.
The ad breached CAP Code clauses 3.1 (Substantiation) and 7.1 (Truthfulness).
Action
We told Envenio not to repeat the claim “over 5,000 registered clients” unless they had sufficient evidence to substantiate it. We advised them to seek guidance from the CAP Copy Advice team for their future ads.

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