Ofcom fines Lakeland Radio £15,000 for unfair conduct of competitions
On Friday 29 May 2009, Ofcom imposed statutory sanctions on Lakeland Radio Limited, which runs a local commercial radio station based in South Lakeland, for breaches of the Ofcom Broadcasting Code.
Lakeland Radio broadcast three listener competitions between 2 January 2008 and 1 May 2008. Suss the Celeb was a daily competition in which a clip of mystery celebrity’s voice was broadcast and listeners were invited to guess the celebrity to whom the voice belonged. The competitions’ terms and conditions stated that every day one or more entrants, selected at random, would have their answers revealed on air at the end of that day’s round. If these entries were incorrect, all other entries that day were discarded and the competition began afresh the next day. The same clip was broadcast until correctly identified. The cash prize began at £5 and increased each day by £5 until the clip was identified.
Entrants could submit their answers via telephone (at a cost of 5p per minute from a landline) or text message (25p plus a standard network charge).
Complaint
Ofcom received a complaint from a listener who had repeatedly entered the competition with the correct answer but whose entries had never been selected, despite the small size of Lakeland Radio’s audience.
Ofcom investigated all three competitions, which consisted of 85 daily rounds. In most of these rounds, the presenter had breached the competition’s terms and conditions by deliberately selecting incorrect entries to broadcast. The purpose of this was to increase the value of the ultimate cash prize by preventing the competition from being won too soon. All listeners who entered the early rounds, therefore, had no chance of winning. Ofcom held that the three competitions were conducted unfairly, in breach of rule 2.11 of the Ofcom Broadcasting Code, which states, “Competitions should be conducted fairly, prizes should be described accurately and rules should be clear and appropriately made known.”
The Ofcom Committee considered these breaches to be “very serious” and “a significant breakdown in the fundamental relationship of trust between a local radio station and its listeners”. Listeners who had paid to enter the competitions had suffered financial loss, however minimal. Furthermore, they were deceived as to the fair conduct of the competitions.
Lakeland Radio was criticised for many failures. It was under a duty to ensure that staff received appropriate compliance training and that compliance checks and procedures were in place. This failure was exacerbated by the fact that there have been several recent high-profile broadcasting cases involving the unfair conduct of competitions.
Ofcom considered the small size of the radio station irrelevant in terms of the seriousness of the breaches. The apology broadcast by Lakeland Radio was equally no mitigating factor, as it failed to explain the “unfair conduct” sufficiently clearly to enable listeners to seek refunds, and therefore did not adequately remedy the detriment originally caused.
Consequently, Ofcom fined Lakeland Radio £15,000 and ordered the radio station to broadcast a statement of Ofcom’s findings.
This decision follows a spate of high profile decisions relating to conduct of competitions and reminds advertisers and broadcasters of the importance of complying with the rules.
