Sky Broadband complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) saying that Virgin Media was misleading consumers with its online ads with sport star Usain Bolt.

The campaign promised that all of Virgin Media customers' broadband speeds would be boosted. ASA has upheld the complaint because not "all" customers saw their speeds double and as a result the ads are now banned.

The provider fired back saying that it did not intend to do anything misleading and that it specifically looked at CAP (Committee of Advertising Practice) advice prior to launching the campaign.

Nevertheless, the ASA decided to go forward with the ban and shed more detail in its assessment report:

"We understood that CAP Copy Advice had advised Virgin that the claim "I'm doubling everyone's broadband speeds" would be problematic if there were any exclusions and that the claim could have made clear that it was intended to refer to Virgin customers only.

"We noted the headline claim in ad (a) stated "I'm doubling everyone's broadband speeds" ... We therefore considered consumers would interpret the ad to mean that all existing Virgin customers would have their broadband speed doubled.

"We understood that 100Mbps and non-cable broadband customers would not have their broadband speeds doubled and we therefore considered the text "cabled areas only" and "100Mbps customers will see price-cut instead of speed doubling" directly contradicted the headline claim."

As of now the ads are banned and cannot be displayed in their current form, meaning that Virgin Media is to make some tweaks to the wording in order to continue pushing the campaign.