Tesco tried to implicate ‘the whole food industry’ in its horse meat scandal
HARD luck Tesco. The Advertising Standards Agency has banned its horse meat scandal apology that appeared in the national press for misleading readers into believing there were issues with meat standards across the entire food industry:
“What burgers have taught us. The problem we’ve had with some of our meat lately is about more than burgers and bolognese. It’s about some of the ways we get meat to your dinner table. It’s about the whole food industry. And it has made us realise, we really do need to make it better. We’ve been working on it, but we need to keep going, go further, move quicker. We know that our supply chain is too complicated. So we’re making it simpler … Seriously. This is it. We are changing.”
No. It wasn’t. It was about some supermarket ready-meals.
The ASA responded:
“We considered that despite the use of words such as ‘we’ and ‘our’ in the preceding sentences, the ad made a definitive statement, ‘It’s about the whole food industry’. We considered that the omission of ‘we’ or ‘our’ from that sentence made it stand out from the surrounding text and informed readers’ understanding of the rest of the ad. Therefore, we concluded consumers would understand the ad referenced all food retailers and suppliers, rather than Tesco alone.”
Posted: 5th, September 2013 | In: The Consumer Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
