The Advertising Standards Authority has upheld two complaints against Virgin Media with regards to its "Real deal" press campaign.

The national and regional press ads featured the headline "The real deal" and included a table comparing Virgin Media's and Sky's TV, broadband and phone services.

Beside the section 'TV', the text for Virgin Media stated "Our top TV package (XL) plus access to a library of over 500 films, 1000s of music videos and TV shows you can control like a DVD And we provide free servicing and repairs." For Sky, the text stated "Their top TV package (6 Mixes) Plus nothing."

Sky's complaint said that the ad was not explicit that "the access to a library of over 500 films" with Virgin's XL package was a pay-per-view service, rather than included in the price. It also said that the ads misrepresented the Sky 6-mix offering, implying there were no additional services, when these customers could have access to Sky Box Office, Sky Anytime on PC or Sky Plus.

Beside the section "Broadband", the text for Virgin Media stated "Up to 2Mb with as many downloads as you want", and for Sky the text stated "They say it's up to 8Mb but the further you live from the exchange the slower it gets. And they decide how much you can download."

Both Sky and a member of the public questioned whether the comparisons in the ads were fair, because Sky offered a cheaper 2Mb broadband service, which they believed was more comparable to the Virgin Media service advertised. Sky also challenged whether "the real deal" and "the real price" claims in the ads were misleading, because they believed they implied the £30 a month charge for the services was the standard rate for the service, not a promotional offer, and because the ads did not make this clear.

Virgin responded by saying they had been unaware of the 2Mb offering from Sky. They explained that the price advertised was the "real price", because it was the total price that a customer would pay each month with no additional costs, such as line rental. Virgin also claimed its small print was explicit about the pay-per-view element of the film library, but said Sky Box Office and Sky Anytime were not comparable to its on-demand service.

The ASA considered that, because Sky's 2 Mb broadband services was a more comparable service to Virgin's advertised 2Mb service than Sky's 8 Mb broadband services, the comparison was unfair and likely to mislead. The adjudication also acknowledged Virgin's argument that, to consumers, the promotional price of £30 a month was the standard price for the minimum term of the 12-month contract, and that the small print included the relevant information to this and the pay-per-view on-demand service.

But it added: "We nevertheless considered that this information was not prominent enough to make clear that "the real deal" was a promotional offer and there would be a price rise of at least £9 a month after the deal had expired. We therefore concluded that the claims "the real deal", in [the] ads and the claim "The Real Price" were ambiguous and that both ads were misleading by omission, because they did not make sufficiently clear that the Virgin offer was a time-limited promotion or give prominent information about the standard price of the service."

The ASA also said the small print text regarding the pay-per-view element of Virgin's on-demand service was "inadequate to make clear that not all of the content was inclusive, but some was separately chargeable."

"We considered that this was compounded by the use of the text 'plus nothing' in Sky's section of the comparison, because it did not include Sky's pay-per-view content and, by doing so, implied access to all of Virgin's library was inclusive. Because it was not, we considered the ad to be misleading on this point," the ASA stated.

By stating prominently in the ads that Sky's DSL network became slower with distance in the body copy of the ad, but not making a statement of equivalent prominence about Virgin Media's own broadband speed limitation, the ASA said was "unfair."

"We also acknowledged that Virgin had not used Sky's most comparable internet product of 2 Mb when making the comparison. However, because Virgin had not shown that the typical speeds achieved by their users were close enough to 2 Mb to mean that their experience was not affected in any meaningful way, we concluded that the claim was misleading by omission," the adjudication said.

The ASA has advised Virgin not to repeat the ads and requested it seeks assistance for the amendments from the CAP (Codes of Advertising Practice) Copy Advice team.