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Morrisons under fire over misleading wine ad

Bradford-based supermarket chain Morrisons has found itself on the wrong side of advertising rules for a wine promotion that drinkers couldn’t find in their local stores.

A press ad and a website promotion of the which offered some big name wines at ‘3 for £10. £5 each’ prompted two people to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) after they found none of the wine was in stock.

Morrisons said that, based on their experience of similar offers, they estimated they would sell around 530,000 bottles of wine in the promotional period but in fact they started to run low on stocks on the first day.

They had allowed a contingency stock of 399,000 bottles.

By the end of the offer they had sold over 1 million bottles of the wines included in the promotion.

The ASA which today ruled that the Bradford supermarket giant was in breach of the rules and that it must look at ways to make good on such offers in the future.

The ASA said: “We considered that the speed with which the advertised products ran out demonstrated that the estimate of demand was not adequate for the purpose of satisfying the requirements of the Code.

“We also noted that the promotion continued to be advertised for up to three days after the advertiser became aware of the problems with stock levels and concluded that the ads were misleading.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Clare Burnett .