Who: The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and Emma Matratzen GmbH t/a Emma Mattress
Where: United Kingdom
When: 8 November 2023
Law stated as at: 22 January 2024
What happened:
The ASA has ruled against Emma Mattress for two paid-for adverts that featured on a third-party platform in May 2023 for the mattress comparison site top5bestmattresses.co.uk (or Top 5). The ASA ruled that consumers may have been misled into thinking that they were watching an ad from an independent mattress review site, when in fact Top 5 is owned and controlled by a subsidiary of Emma Mattress.
The two ads featured a video of a representative in a Top 5 t-shirt positively speaking about the Emma Mattress: “Today, we’ll be testing the UK’s most awarded mattress: the Emma original.” The person went onto explain different features and qualities of the mattress, concluding the video with “we love Emma and everything about it. Try it and tell us how your first nights were with it. See you in the next review.”
It also featured a static image that contained graphics of a person lying on a mattress with advisory notes such as “How to choose a mattress” and a link to the “Best” products.
Emma Mattress responded that in their view it was clear that Top 5 was owned by a mattress company and that the complainants themselves had understood this. They stated that the ads contained a hyperlink to the landing page of the Top 5 website, which contains text explaining this. However, Emma Mattress did not explicitly state this in the ads themselves.
The ads were held to have breached the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising and Direct & Promotional Marketing (CAP Code) rules 2.3 (Recognition of marketing materials), and 3.1, 3.3 and 3.9 (Misleading advertising). Emma Mattress has been told by the ASA to make sure that the company’s future marketing communications make clear their ‘commercial intent’. Emma Mattress responded stating it had changed ad 1 to include the overlaying text “Top5 best mattress is a comparison site operated by DIBMat GmbH, a fully owned subsidiary of Emma Sleep GmbH that owns the Emma mattress featured on this video”.
Why this matters: Both of the ads in question implied to consumers that they were independent comparisons of popular mattresses when in fact, they were ads for Emma Mattress. For advertisers, the takeaway message is clear. Ensure that information that is material to consumers’ understanding of the ads and the commercial intent is displayed clearly within the marketing communication itself – this includes where there is a partiality between another entity (if that is not obvious from the context).
