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Date of Publication: March 7
Year of Publication: 2022
Publication City: London, UK
Publisher: BBC Future
Author(s): Isabelle Gerretsen
Consumers can struggle to unravel whether claims about a brand or product’s sustainability are accurate, but regulators are cracking down on companies promoting misleading climate claims in their advertising.
In September 2019, Ryanair circulated a series of adverts on TV, radio and online which urged customers to fly with “Europe’s Lowest Fares, Lowest Emissions Airline. Everybody knows that when you fly Ryanair you enjoy the lowest fares. But do you know you are travelling on the airline with Europe’s lowest emissions as well?”
The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA), the UK’s advertising watchdog, banned the campaign several months later after concluding that these claims were misleading. In its ruling, the ASA said that consumers would find insufficient information in the adverts to substantiate the company’s claims that it was Europe’s lowest emissions airline. The ASA highlighted that data provided as evidence for the claim dated from eight years earlier and did not appear to include some well-known airlines.