A Deliveroo ad depicting a combined delivery from multiple restaurants has been banned.
In the ad, a woman is seen receiving a bagged delivery from Deliveroo, before reaching inside to hand out food from multiple restaurants to the people inside.
The ad then turns fantastical as the woman herself climbs inside the bag.
The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) said the ad was misleading and could give the impression that its app allowed orders from different restaurants to be combined.
Deliveroo does not currently offer this feature and a separate delivery charge would be required for each restaurant a customer ordered from.
Though small-print in the advert clarifies that “separate orders must be made for each restaurant”, the ASA ruled that the warning wasn’t sufficient enough to avoid the confusion.
The ad received 300 complaints, making it the second-most complained about UK TV ad in 2019, behind a GoCompare ad which complainants claimed could trivialise car accidents.
Deliveroo has since removed the advert.
“While we acknowledged Deliveroo’s willingness to include additional on-screen text to clarify the nature of their service, we considered such text was unlikely to be sufficient to alter the overall impression that their customers could order food from different restaurants to be delivered together,” said the ASA in its ruling.
“Because that was not the case, and because the ad did not state that a delivery charge would be applied to each order from a different restaurant, we concluded it was likely to mislead.”
A spokeswoman from the company defended the sequence of events depicted in the advert, saying they were fantastical in nature.
“For the record, you can’t actually dive into your Deliveroo bag, however hungry you are,” she said.
This is the second time that the ASA has intervened in the advertising of Deliveroo’s technology offering.
It was forced to pull a previous advert screened in March after it seemingly implied orders could be delivered anywhere in the UK.
In the ad, a voiceover stated “order what you want; where you want; when you want it”, despite the service not being available throughout the UK.