Molly-Mae Hague Under Fire For Breaking Rules With 'Unfair' Instagram Giveaway
3 March 2021, 13:56
Molly-Mae Hague’s popular £8K Instagram giveaway has now been called out by the Advertising Standards Authority for breaking promotional rules.
It has been found that Molly-Mae Hague’s £8,000 Instagram giveaway has failed to follow promotional rules, according to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
The Love Island star did an online prize draw in September 2020, where she gave her followers the chance to win £8K worth of luxury items in celebration of her reaching 1 million YouTube subscribers.
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The items included Louis Vuitton luggage, handbags, a laptop and products from her own fake tan range.
In order for her followers to have a chance of winning, they had to follow and subscribe to her social media channels as well as tag a friend in the post.
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However, the UK’s advertising watchdog has now said that the prize draw was not administered fairly after Molly-Mae was unable to give evidence that the winners had been picked randomly and fairly.
According to the watchdog’s website, Molly-Mae had told them that the post “did not provide an incentive to engage with a brand or a product and therefore they believed the post was not a promotion and would not fall under the scope of the Code."
“That notwithstanding, Ms Hague said that, in the presence and under the supervision of an independent person, she had instructed a member of her management team to pick a group of participants at random that could be publicly seen to be following her profiles. These were all manually selected out of a hat at random,” the post read.
The ASA claimed that they hadn’t seen evidence that showed that the first group of participants was made at random from all of the entries.
12 people filed complaints after they believed they were not given a fair chance of winning the prize.
Molly-Mae first faced backlash for her giveaway in September last year and addressed the issue on her Instagram Story at the time, writing: “For people saying that 25 names in a generator isn’t fair… we literally spent all week brainstorming the best way to pick.
“There was no software or app that would allow me to put in two million (I repeat 2 million) IG comments without logging in with my insta password which I would never ever do. Let’s just all be happy for the winner please. It’s only a light hearted giveaway.”
The ASA said: We told Molly-Mae Hague to ensure their future promotions were administered fairly and that prizes were awarded to genuine winners in accordance with the laws of chance and by an independent person or under the supervision of an independent person.”
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