by Renee Israel
In January 2010, 888 Ladies Bingo launched their Golden Ticket promotion. As part of the launch, they released two television advertisements which stated that the top prize for the Golden Ticket Promotion was £5 million.
The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) received a complaint from an unknown viewer who claimed that the advertisement was misleading as the top prize was impossible to win and the advertisement therefore exaggerated the amount a player could win.
In order to win the big prize, a player must match 24 numbers on their card in the first 24 calls. It has been calculated that the odds of winning the £5 million prize are 1 in 25778699578894555700. These odds are so low that it believed that nothing similar has ever occurred in any other game.
The top prize is won only if the player matches 24 numbers in 24 calls. For every additional number that is called, the prize money drops, it until it reaches 40 ball, after which the prize remains constant at £50,000 regardless of the number of balls called.
Cassava Enterprises, the owner of 888 Ladies Bingo, disagreed with the viewer's claim stating that the ad did not make mentioned of a guaranteed maximum prize fun, but rather focused on the fact that the bingo player could gain enter into the game by winning a golden ticket.
Clearcast, the organization that gives the go-ahead to very advertisement shown on UK television, agreed with Cassava Enterprises.
The ASA, after deliberating on the arguments, ruled that the 888 Ladies Bingo Golden Ticket advertisement breached TV advertisement rules for being misleading and that it could not be shown in its current form.
