The intensity of the ongoing advertising feud between low cost airlines, Ryanair and Easyjet, has reached new highs this week, with Ryanair not only being reprimanded by the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) for publishing misleading adverts, but also having to pay the Easyjet founder damages in an out of court settlement over adverts depicting Sir Stelios as Pinocchio.
The ASA reprimanded Ryanair for advertising £10 one way fares to Gothenburg and Dusseldorf, "subject to availability and excluding fees and charges". Easyjet queried whether these fares included taxes, charges and check-in fees, and alleged that the adverts misled customers to believe that there were no date restrictions on these fares.
Whilst Ryanair claimed that there was no requirement to include within the advert the specific dates on which the offer applied, the ASA concluded that the advert offering the £10 deal was likely to mislead consumers into thinking that the £10 fare was a fixed price, rather than limited to specific dates.
In terms of the damages payable for the "Pinocchio" adverts, Easyjet's founder took action against Ryanair when four adverts depicting Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou with a "Pinocchio" style nose, suggesting that he was lying about Easyjet's punctuality statistics, appeared in the papers in January and February this year. Ryanair chief Michael O'Leary apologised to Sir Stelios for referring to him personally in the adverts, and agreed not only to pay him damages of £50,000, but also to pay his legal costs.
Both airlines have been subject to numerous referrals to the ASA as a result of misleading adverts, and indeed in 2008, the ASA referred Ryanair to the OFT for "persistent failure to abide by the Code of Advertising Practice".
So let this be a reminder – make sure your advertising is clear and not potentially misleading, and be very, very careful when making allegations about competitors or their products in your adverts - they may be defamatory in which case your advert might cost you more than you bargained for and end up damaging your reputation rather than your competitors'.
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