The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has panned and banned a Pure Cremation TV for misleading people into believing they’re buying a funeral service as part of its standard offer.
However, the ban proved to be short-lived as a re-edited version was back on air almost immediately.
The long-running ad features a woman in her home surrounded by the remnants of a celebration, describing Pure’s proper, dignified, respectful service and its beautiful crematorium. The ASA ruled “the ad misleadingly implied the standard Pure Cremation package included an in-person funeral service, when that was not the case”. The watchdog received 12 complaints, which it upheld
It banned Pure from running the ad again in that form and warned it to ensure future commercials did not imply the standard plan included an attended funeral service, and to make clear where a plan was limited to an unattended cremation.
Pure Cremation chief marketing officer Ian Atkinson said: “The ASA said we should be explicit that family do not attend the cremation. We have tweaked the ad to reflect that point; the small changes have been approved by Clearcast, the current ad ends on 16th June and the revised ad will be live on 17th June. Pure has also released another new TV ad that leads with the fact that there’s no crematorium ceremony with our plan, so family can hold a more personal send-off or celebration of life.”
Clearcast is the pre-broadcast clearance system for TV ads and works with advertisers and their agencies to ensure ads comply with the rules. Clearcast cleared the previous version of the ad and supported Pure’s view that it was not misleading.
The ASA judgement stated: “Viewers were likely to understand from the woman’s statement, ‘it was a proper, dignified cremation. They were so respectful. Pure have their own beautiful crematorium, and they hand delivered his ashes in an urn’, together with the repeated references to a ‘funeral plan’, that the plan offered more than the practical arrangements for a non-attended cremation alone.
“Describing the crematorium as ‘beautiful’ and the cremation as ‘dignified’ suggested a personal and ceremonial element to the service. Viewers were likely to assume that the woman’s ability to describe the cremation in those terms meant she had some basis on which to reflect on the experience directly, and therefore some form of attended ceremony or service had taken place, for which she had been present.”
Pure argued that the disclaimer at the end of the advert, made it clear that was offered was an unattended cremation, but the ASA ruled that it was “not sufficient to override the overall impression created by the language used in the ad.