UK advertising regulator Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned an advertisement campaign by Lufthansa Group and ordered a probe into the campaign.
The campaign had an image of a Lufthansa plane and the earth with the words: “Connecting the world. Protecting its future.” It also included the hashtag #MakeChangeFly.
According to a report in The Guardian, the ad campaign was banned as ASA felt that it is misleading consumers, giving the impression that choosing to fly with the airline is making an environmental impact.
The poster campaign of the airliner also had a link to its Make Change Fly environmental campaign website.
The airliner said the ad campaign was open to interpretation and would not be perceived as an absolute promise being made.
Although Lufthansa told ASA that the claims were based on the airliner's aspirations, the authority pointed out that people may think the ad was meant to communicate the message that the airliner has already taken significant steps to ensure that its environmental impact is not harmful.
“We considered the claim was likely to be understood by consumers to mean that Lufthansa had already taken significant mitigating steps to ensure that the net environmental impact of their business was not harmful,” the regulator was quoted as saying.
Banning the ad campaign, ASA asked Lufthansa to come up with unambiguous claims that can be substantiated.
“We also understood that there were currently no environmental initiatives or commercially viable technologies in the aviation industry which would substantiate the absolute green claim ‘protecting its future’, as we considered consumers would interpret it," The Guardian quoted ASA as saying.
