PrettyLittleThing

Everything is everything, except when it’s not.

On its U.S. website, fast fashion retailer PrettyLittleThing proclaims “50% Off Everything*.” But the asterisk doesn’t go anywhere – it doesn’t link to any corresponding terms.

This comes after the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority announced last week that a similar ad campaign the U.K.-based company ran on X, formerly known as Twitter, breached its advertising code.

Last fall, PrettyLittleThing, which has an online store for U.S. consumers and sells its products at U.S. stores such as Walmart, published a series of posts on X over a seven-day period in which it advertised discounts on “everything” or “every single thing.”

The ASA said that while several of the posts, including the one above, affixed an asterisk to “everything,” suggesting that exclusions apply, PrettyLittleThing didn’t link the asterisk to any qualifying information.

Even when some ads included qualifying information that sale and beauty items were excluded, the ASA said it considered the disclosure of these terms “not sufficient to counter the overriding impression of the ads that all products would be discounted by the stated percentage.”

In other words, to quote the ASA’s U.S. counterpart, the FTC, “what the headline giveth, the footnote cannot taketh away.”

The ASA also took issue with the absence of promotion end dates in some of the posts.

In response to the ASA’s inquiry, PrettyLittleThing said, among other things, that the company always tries to include significant conditions to promotions in the ads themselves but sometimes space is limited.

The ASA said that the ads “must not appear again in the form investigated” and told the company to ensure that future ads do not falsely state or imply that a promotion includes all product lines.

The ad regulator also told the company to include promotion end dates in ads unless it can demonstrate their absence would not disadvantage consumers.

TINA.org reached out to PrettyLittleThing for comment. Check back for updates.

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