Crème de la crème: the ASA’s Health and Beauty Products and Therapies Advertisements Survey 2009

29 October 2009

For years, advertisers have offered creams, lotions, tonics and devices to help us achieve the body beautiful or cure aches and pains or even serious medical conditions. The health and beauty market is huge and competition within it is fierce, which can lead to bold claims from advertisers in this sector. All advertisers must ensure their product claims, bold or not, are substantiated; claims for how much younger, slimmer or healthier a product can make you must be supported by robust evidence.

Advertisers in this area are expected to comply with the general rules that prevent ads from being misleading, harmful, offensive or otherwise socially irresponsible. However, specific rules on the advertising of health and beauty products also exist in the advertising codes.

All claims, especially medical and scientific claims, should be backed up by evidence, and where appropriate, should be in the form of trials conducted on people.

If an advertiser claims a product will have a physiological or psychological effect on the user they need to hold detailed evidence to back up those claims. Statements that are merely a matter of opinion or claims that relate to a superficial effect are often acceptable. 

Advertisers need to tread especially carefully if they refer to a serious medical condition in their ads.  Advertisers should not discourage essential treatment.  They should not offer specific advice on, diagnosis of or treatment for serious or prolonged conditions unless it is conducted under the supervision of a doctor or other suitably qualified health professional (eg one subject to regulation by a statutory or recognised medical or health professional body).  If a product is classed as medicinal, marketers need to obtain a marketing authorisation from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) before selling that product in the UK.

In 2009, the ASA has already issued over 150 rulings on ads for health and beauty products

Three examples of those are;

Two TV ads for a bio-oil product claimed the product could “improve the appearance of scars, stretch marks and uneven skin tone”.  The evidence submitted did not meet the standard of evidence required to support the claims and the ASA concluded that they could mislead.

A direct mailing, for an "organic silica gel”, made various efficacy claims and claimed that the product could be used to treat serious medical conditions such as arthritis, prostate problems and Alzheimer’s disease.  Three complainants challenged whether the advertisers could substantiate the efficacy claims and whether the product could be used to treat serious medical conditions. The ASA concluded that the ad was irresponsible, made unproven, unacceptable and unauthorised medicinal claims and was likely to mislead.

A leaflet, for a skin cream and an eye cream, claimed that, amongst other things, it could reverse the cellular aging process, diminish wrinkles and crow’s feet and tone and lift the eyelids. The ASA considered that the claims suggested a more permanent effect than merely the temporary reduction of fine lines and wrinkles.  It considered that the evidence submitted by the advertisers was not sufficiently robust to support the strong efficacy claims and concluded that the ad was misleading.

The ASA has published the findings of its Health and Beauty Products and Therapies Advertisements Survey 2009. It conducted a monitoring exercise to measure the compliance rate of health and beauty advertisements in a variety of media. The report shows that 95.1% of ads surveyed were deemed to comply with the Codes. That is an improvement on the results of the 2006 Survey, which recorded a compliance rate of 90.5%. 451 ads were assessed across all media over a week in February 2009.  22 breached the Advertising Codes; all were in non-broadcast media.

Online ads were included in the survey for the first time since a health and beauty survey was last conducted (2006).  Of the 451 ads, 76 were online ads (16.8%) and of those, we considered 7 (9.2%) breached the CAP Code. 

The CAP Compliance team will continue to monitor health and beauty ads across all media to assess the levels of compliance with the Codes.