A Cheshire accountancy firm has fallen foul of the advertising watch dog – for favourably reviewing its own software.
The Accountancy Partnership from Wirral was reported to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) by rival accountancy firm Crunch Accounting which believed the website and the review published were misleading.
Alongside reviews for its own product, the company, trading as Pandle, also gave ratings for the competitor and described it in unfavourable terms.
The ASA agreed with the complaints and this morning published its ruling and said the ads must not appear again.
“We told Pandle to make clear the commercial intent of the site www.accountingreviews.co.uk and to ensure that site reviews of competitors’ software did not misleadingly omit the basis for comparative claims. We also told them to ensure that they objectively compared one or more material, relevant, verifiable and representative feature of those products and did not include claims which were subjective or incapable of verification.”
You can read the full ruling here.
