ASA upholds ruling against Arsenal crypto ad

The British advertising watchdog said Arsenal’s crypto token ads were misleading and irresponsible.

UK.- The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld its ruling against Arsenal Football Club’s advertising of a crypto-based Arsenal Fan Token. It has rejected the club’s appeal against its initial ruling, which criticised the ads for being misleading and irresponsible.

The ASA said the ads fell short of standards on three counts, finding that they took advantage of customers’ inexperience, and trivialised investment in cryptocurrency.

It also said the ads failed to communicate the risk of the investment and failed to make clear that the promotional token was a cryptoasset that could only be obtained by exchanging it with another cryptocurrency that then had to be purchased. 

Arsenal partnered with fan token creator Socios for the initiative. It argued in its appeal that Fan Tokens were “utility tokens used to encourage fan participation, and therefore were materially different to cryptocurrencies which were virtual currencies used as a means of payment”.

It said: “Fan Tokens were promoted responsibly by reminding fans they only needed one token to vote in Club decisions, that they should only purchase what they could afford, and they had included information on the website that included risk warnings.”

The club also claimed that the promotion’s target audience understood the cryptocurrency market, and that Socios was well-known as a cryptocurrency platform. 

The ASA has warned Arsenal not to run the promotions again and to make sure that future promotions do not trivialise crypto investment.