OUTsurance told to pull Cape Town ads over misleading pointsmen claims - IOL

OUTsurance has been ordered to hit the brakes on its Cape Town radio adverts, which told motorists its traffic controllers were easing congestion and helping them reach their destinations quickly and safely, despite having stopped the service in the city nine years ago.

OUTsurance has been ordered to hit the brakes on its Cape Town radio adverts, which told motorists its traffic controllers were easing congestion and helping them reach their destinations quickly and safely, despite having stopped the service in the city nine years ago.

The Advertising Regulatory Board ruled that the adverts could mislead listeners into believing OUTsurance still had traffic controllers working in the Mother City.

The ruling, handed down earlier this month, ordered OUTsurance to pull the adverts from CapeTalk and any other radio station with a mainly Cape Town audience.

"Language inviting listeners to feel personally assisted by the pointsmen, without any geographic qualifier, is capable of creating the impression, in the mind of the ordinary listener located in the Cape Town metropolitan area, that the service extends to their own experience of traffic congestion," the board said in its ruling.

"It is the directorate's assessment that the advertiser should have reasonably foreseen that airing the advertising in the geographical context of the Cape Town metropolitan area, the principal audience of the radio station, would result in it being factually misleading.

"The directorate accepts that a 30-second advertisement or live read cannot reasonably be expected to enumerate every municipality served, but this does not extend to omitting any indication that the service does not extend to the metropolitan area from which the broadcast draws its primary audience."

OUTsurance calls its traffic controllers pointsmen, and said in 2023 that they were posted at busy intersections every day to direct cars, and sent to areas where traffic lights were down during load shedding.

The insurer said at the time that its pointsmen had worked in the Cape Town city centre from 2011 until 2017.

OUTsurance told the board that its pointsmen now worked only in Paarl and Stellenbosch in the Western Cape.

The adverts, which ran as 30-second commercials and as live reads by CapeTalk presenters, told listeners the pointsmen had been easing traffic congestion for 20 years. One set of adverts listed things drivers worry about while stuck in traffic, such as whether they had switched off the iron, and told listeners that with the pointsmen on their route, traffic was one less thing to stress about.

Another set listed a laundry list of excuses for arriving late, and told listeners they no longer needed excuses because the pointsmen were on the roads.

The listener who complained to the board said the adverts played several times a day, and that the pointsmen had not been allowed to work in Cape Town for more than 10 years.

He said he had tried to take the matter up with CapeTalk's management, but got no reply.

OUTsurance argued that the adverts never claimed the pointsmen worked in Cape Town, and that the 20-year line referred only to how long the programme had existed.

The insurer also argued that a reasonable listener would not believe the pointsmen worked everywhere CapeTalk could be heard, and asked the board to dismiss the complaint.

The board rejected that argument and ordered the adverts off air as soon as the station's broadcast schedule allowed.