Every maths teacher has said it at some point: the right answer with no working out gets you nothing. Full marks are reserved for those who can show, step by step, how they got there. The ASA has just delivered exactly that lesson to EE, and the mobile network has come away with a rather patchy report card.

The ad in question was a digital poster, seen twice over the course of last year, declaring "MORE PEOPLE ARE CHOOSING EE BROADBAND" and inviting switchers to join "THE UK'S FASTEST GROWING BROADBAND PROVIDER". In small print at the bottom sat the now familiar comparative-claims safety net, "To verify see ee.co.uk/claims". Sky and Vodafone were not convinced, and challenged the ad on two fronts: that the growth figures were inflated by customers who had simply been shuffled internally from BT to EE within the same corporate family, and that the claim could not actually be checked. 

On the first point, EE got to keep its blazer. The ASA accepted that even when internal BT-to-EE migrations were stripped out entirely, EE had still grown its broadband base faster than any other major provider over the relevant two-year period, with growth of 49% against a nearest rival's 34%. So while Sky and Vodafone had a fair point that counting your own cousins as new friends looks generous, it turned out EE would have topped the class anyway. No breach on misleadingness. 

It is the second issue, verifiability, where the real lesson sits, and it is one every advertiser running a comparative claim needs to absorb. The CAP Code requires that a comparison with an identifiable competitor must either include, or point consumers towards, enough information to understand the comparison and check it is accurate. A link at the bottom of an ad is not, in itself, homework done. It is only a promise that the homework exists somewhere, and the ASA went looking for it.

What it found was underwhelming. When Sky first saw the ad in June last year, there was nothing on the verification page relevant to the claims at all, an empty locker where the notes should have been. A document did later appear, but its first version relied on self-reported survey data that made no attempt to separate genuine competitive switchers from internal BT Group migrations, which the ASA considered the single most important piece of information a curious consumer would want. A second table was eventually bolted on, giving percentage growth once BT migrations were excluded, but it gave no underlying subscriber numbers, so nobody could actually check the sum for themselves. 

As if one incomplete answer sheet were not enough, the ASA also found an old, unrelated document still lurking on the same verification page, filed under a different but similarly worded claim, using stale 2022 to 2023 data that EE said it no longer relied on. A conscientious consumer trying to mark their own work might easily have picked up the wrong exercise book. And to compound matters, actually finding any of this required scrolling through lists of claims with no clear signposting. Verifiability breached, under CAP Code rule 3.34. 

The takeaway for anyone running a comparative campaign is not subtle. Substantiation has to exist and be adequate from the moment the ad first runs, not retrofitted once the complaints start landing on the doormat. It has to actually address the point a sceptical reader would raise, in EE's case the BT migration question, rather than dance around it with aggregate percentages and no raw numbers. It needs to be kept current as the campaign runs on, since verification data that stalls in March while the ad keeps appearing into October leaves a gap someone will eventually notice. And it needs to be tidy: no orphaned old documents dressed up as evidence, and no verification hub that requires the digital equivalent of rummaging through a filing cabinet. 

EE's growth claim, on the numbers, turned out to be perfectly true. But being right was not enough. The ASA wanted to see the working, and for a while at least, the dog appears to have eaten it.