The Advertising Standards Authority has demanded that a pension liberation text message campaign be pulled as the marketing company breached its code by not seeking consent from recipients and not disclosing its identity.
A complaint was lodged with the ASA by a recipient of a text message offering to “release” money from a “trapped or frozen” pension.
The text message read: ““TRAPPED or FROZEN Pension? Release large cash sum NOW! Achieve high growth yield. Reply PENSION for info or STOP to opt out”.
The ASA said it was taking against Clarity Leads Ltd as the de facto sender of the message, as the was evidence that leads from the campaign had been sold by the firm to a claims management company.
Clarity had said it did not send the text messages but that it had previously acted as a broker for SMS leads.
The ASA said the ads breached its code as there was no evidence that “appropriate consent had been received prior to the text message being sent, or that records were held about the recipient”.
It added that a lack of information from the marketing company behind the messages also breached the code.
The ASA said: “The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Clarity Leads Ltd to hold the explicit consent of consumers before sending text messages in future.
“We also told them to ensure that future text messages included details of their identity.