Crazy frog spawns changes
08 September 2005
ONLY those living on Mars could not have seen or heard the Crazy Frog ad in the last year. The singing amphibian has taken both the mobile download and the music chart worlds by storm. Not everyone, though, has been won over. Many people complained that downloading the tune locked them into an expensive subscription service.
The downloading of ringtones, videos and animations has been an undoubted phenomenon in recent years. Hundreds of thousands of people have leapt on the chance to have their favourite pop tune as their ringtone or have their favourite cartoon or pin-up character as their wallpaper.
As the ASA discovered, many people had no idea that, sometimes, in downloading a ringtone they would pay more than the expected one-off charge. In fact, they unwittingly signed up to a subscription service. Extra downloads were sent by the advertiser every week – each one draining money out of the customer’s account. That information, and how to stop the subscription, was included only in the smallprint of advertisements.
After complaints to the ASA about advertising by Crazy Frog creator Jamba, the ASA ruled that the Jamba ads for mobile phone subscription services did not state clearly enough that the services were subscription services or how much it would cost every week. The CAP Compliance team wrote to the mobile phone download industry asking it to make these changes to its advertisements:
• State clearly and prominently in the body copy, not the small print, that the service is a subscription service and
• State clearly the daily, weekly or monthly cost of the service.
Fellow regulator ICSTIS has launched new rules for the advertising of mobile phone subscription services (see here for more information about what is expected of advertisers www.icstis.org.uk/icstis2002/pdf/Guideline_20.pdf). The major mobile phone operators, such as Vodafone and O2, put their heads together and drew up very similar rules for their clients. They have warned their clients that if they fail to comply with their rules, they risk having their short codes terminated.
To read the upheld the ASA adjudication against Jamba, click here.