NAD Decision Offers Guidance On Comparisons Against Categories

When an advertiser makes a comparison against a category of products, it must generally substantiate the claim against 85% of the products in that category. It's common for advertisers to narrow down a category in order to narrow down their substantiation requirements. Although advertisers have some discretion in how they do that, a recent NAD decision suggests there are limits to that discretion.

SharkNinja advertises that its CarpetXpert Deep Carpet Cleaner offers "the best deep carpet cleaning among full-sized deep carpet cleaners." A disclosure explains that the comparison is based on an industry-standard test against "carpet cleaners above 14 lbs."

Bissell makes the TurboClean PowerBrush carpet cleaner, which out-cleans the SharkNinja product, but weighs under 13 pounds. Bissell filed an NAD challenge, arguing that SharkNinja's claim was misleading because it's based on "an arbitrary market segmentation" designed to exclude its product.