Chocolate maker cleared of running unfair online competition

Ferrero, the company behind Kinder chocolate, ran an advertising campaign based on an online search for six 'faces of Kinder'. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received complaints that the competition had been run unfairly.

The complaints centered on whether or not some people were unable to vote for children in the online competition and whether others were able to vote more than once a day, in contravention of the competition's rules.

Ferrero outlined the significant security procedures it undertook to ensure the integrity of the competition, and the ASA said that the competition was fairly run because of these procedures.

"Ferrero provided the ASA with a description of the security precautions which they put in place before the start of the competition to prevent multiple voting. These included a voting evaluation tool, IP address recording, an anti IP address masking system and blocking of automated voting robots," said the ASA's ruling.

"Ferrero also said that they became aware of other, unexpected types of attempt to multi-vote during the course of the competition which they addressed by introducing extra security measures such as captcha technology, blocking new spam robots, retrospectively deleting suspicious votes, maintaining and updating a list of blocked IP masking sites, introducing time delays between vote attempts and putting in place a redirect to prevent users going directly to the vote page which instead would have to be opened as a pop-up," it said.

The competition was run in several stages, some using public votes online to decide winners, some using judges. Ferrero said that there were some children who received large daily votes, but that this could have been the result of informal campaigns on their behalf.

The company produced an independent security company report written at the end of the first public vote which recommended tweaks to the system.

The company said that it changed the system on an ongoing basis when it became clear that the customers of some ISPs could vote multiple times. It said that its attempts to ensure that the system worked well for everyone were significant.

"Ferrero said the website had been built and tested against the standard combination of operating systems and different browser types and versions. While this testing was extensive it was not possible to be completely exhaustive and there would still be some users who experienced problems voting or seeing that their vote had been counted because they were using out-of-date software, had out of date web pages in their cache or were running an unusual configuration," the ASA said.

The ASA concluded that Ferrero had done enough to make sure that the competition was fairly run.

"We noted that, when they became aware of …problems, Ferrero deployed further security measures, including requiring users to register with an e-mail address in order to vote in the final stages of the competition, and we considered that appropriate steps to ensure the security of the voting system had been taken," it said.

"We noted that Ferrero had tested the website against the standard combination of computer set-ups," it said. "Although we acknowledged that some consumers would still have difficulty casting or viewing their vote, we considered that Ferrero had taken reasonable steps to provide voters with information about how they could alter their computer set-up in order to rectify any problems they encountered."