A newspaper website that told users that a new job was “only a click away” has been criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority for promising “thousands of new local vacancies every week” while posting far less jobs, many of them outside Norfolk.
The advert, shown on EDP24.co.uk, the website of Archant-owned daily the Eastern Daily Press, was challenged by local jobs website justjobsnorfolk.co.uk. The competing website also alleged that the advert misled users into thinking EDP24.co.uk was a jobs website, and not in fact a newspaper website.
The ASA agreed with justjobsnorfolk.co.uk that the promise of thousands of jobs was untrue, but did not uphold the second complaint.
In its adjudication, the ASA said: “We noted the jobs section of the EDP24 website offered vacancies across 31 different categories and that most of those categories offered numerous listings, some of which had multiple vacancies.
“However, we also noted many of the listings pertained to jobs outside Norfolk. We considered that readers were likely to interpret the claim ‘thousands of new local vacancies each week’ to mean that there would be thousands of new vacancies in the Norfolk area listed on the EDP24 jobs website every week. Because the evidence did not support that, we concluded that the claim could mislead.”
Archant said it had no plans to continue using the advert in its current form.
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