ASA Rules John Lewis, Boots and Debenhams Black Friday Adverts Misleading Consumers

Three of Britain’s best-known high street names have been reprimanded by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) after a watchdog found that their Black Friday promotions overstated the actual amount of discounts on offer, in a decision that will sharpen the focus on price claims across the retail sector this Christmas.

The regulator concluded that John Lewis, Boots and Debenhams had each breached the advertising code by presenting reference prices that could not be verified as fixed selling prices, the long-standing benchmark by which savings claims were judged.

In the case of John Lewis, two laptop promotions were considered. A MacBook Air advertised with a £150 saving on its previous price of £849 has been found to be under-performing, with third-party pricing data showing the higher price was in place for a while before the promotion started. An Asus laptop, advertised with a £450 discount, was also judged not to represent a real saving.

The ASA also upheld complaints against Debenhams about banners offering discounts of “up to 44%”, and against Boots about the promotion of fragrances marked down from £80 to £60, ruling that there was insufficient evidence in both cases that the higher prices reflected the normal price of goods.

The intervention is part of the ASA’s growing program of AI-assisted surveillance, which has already produced actions against travel firms and online retailer Too Much over similar price claims. The watchdog has made it clear that its active Active Ad Monitoring program is being scaled up to identify suspicious ads at high speed, especially during high-value trading events such as Black Friday and the January sales.

Emily Henwood, Operations Manager at ASA, said shoppers have a right to expect Black Friday deals to be genuine. Marketers, he added, must remember that promotional events do not exempt consumers from the rules and that any discount advertised must be verifiable.

Decisions remain within a broader pattern. Consumer research has repeatedly shown that the Black Friday headline is not all it seems, with one widely reported study finding one in seven Black Friday bargains offered a real discount compared to prices charged at other points in the year. The CAP code is clear on this point: under the guidance of advertising claims, the reference prices must reflect the normal, fixed selling price and the maximum price must be available for a significantly longer period than the discount.

For boards, financial directors and marketing leaders in SMEs taking cues from large retailers, the message is clear. The regulator no longer relies solely on consumer complaints about police costs; algorithmic monitoring does most of the heavy lifting, and the bar for proof of “was/now” claims is being used with increasing force. Recent enforcement against Nationwide for advertising branch closures and Huel and Zoe for an undisclosed commercial relationship with Steven Bartlett underscores the ASA’s willingness to take on household names where it believes consumers have been misled.

George McLellan, a partner in the dispute resolution team at law firm Sharpe Pritchard who defended advertisers in the ASA’s investigation, said the latest decisions showed the regulator to be working very well. “These decisions show the ASA at its best: dealing with specific cases of potentially misleading advertising that directly affects consumers,” he said. “I hope that the ASA and CAP will continue to prioritize this kind of basic legislation over wider efforts to influence social policy through advertising laws.”

For consumers, the takeaway is that skepticism is still the sharpest tool in the consumer’s arsenal. For retailers, the costs of blame now go beyond the decision to fix: reputational damage, the prospect of follow-up action from the Competition and Markets Authority under its strengthened consumer powers, and the increasingly widespread impact on customer loyalty all militate against stricter behavior in how discounts are structured and communicated.

If Black Friday is to remain a serious commercial platform instead of a traditional marketing affair, the burden of proof, the ASA has made clear, sits squarely with the retailer.