Regulator calls out Cadbury promotion

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld a complaint against a promotion for Cadbury that offered consumers the opportunity to design their own chocolate bar.

While the terms and condition stated that the entries would be judged by an independent promotional verification service and a separate expert panel of judges, including one independent judge, the brand has not provided the names of judges on the panel to the complainant.

Mondelez UK said they had been unable to obtain consent to share the internal judges’ personal information due to staff absence at the time of the complainant’s request. But it noted that the job titles of the internal judges has been shared, which they believed adequately showed that those individuals were qualified to act as judges for the promotion.

The ASA however noted that Cadbury should have obtained consent from the internal judges to release their names before the promotion started.

The CAP Code requires an independent judge or a panel that included one independent member must be appointed in competitions where the selection of a winning entry was open to subjective interpretation and the full names of those appointed to judge the competition should be made available on request.

“We considered that because Cadbury had not taken steps before the promotion had started, including setting up the necessary GDPR mechanism, in order to comply with the requirement to release the name of the competition judges on request, the promotion had breached the Code,” the regulator said in the ruling.

Mondelez UK has been told that they must be able to provide the full names of the judges on request in similar competitions in future.