UK Ad Authority Bans Misleading Homescapes and Gardenscapes Ads

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Two misleading ads for mobile games that bear little relation to the actual product have been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The ads, for the Homescapes and Gardenscapes games, both come from developer Playrix. They showed a game where users pull pins in a specific order to solve a puzzle -- though the actual games had totally different "core gameplay." The ASA said the ads should not be used again. Homescapes and Gardenscapes both use the same core gameplay loop: a home or garden needs to be renovated, and players earn the resources they need by playing a "match three" type game -- similar to other popular games such as Bejewelled or Candy Crush. Both Homescapes and Gardenscapes are hugely popular, with more than 100 million app installs each from the Google Play store. But the games have often used ads that show a multiple-choice type puzzle to avert a catastrophe, or, more recently, the pin-pulling puzzle type. Two Facebook ads for Homescapes and Gardenscapes, from March and April this year, were referred to the ASA for being misleading. Despite a brief warning at the bottom of the video that "not all images represent actual gameplay", the ASA sided with the seven people who complained.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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