Olay anti-ageing cream ad banned

A TV ad in which Eve Cameron, the beauty director of She magazine, promotes the "pentapeptides" in Olay anti-ageing skin cream as "effective in reducing the appearance of lines and wrinkles" has been banned for being misleading.

In the commercial, created by ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, Cameron promotes Procter & Gamble's Olay Regenerist skin care cream. She cites a study presented at the World Congress of Dermatology that she claims showed that pentapeptides reduce the appearance of lines and wrinkles.

However, the Advertising Standards Authority, which received 46 complaints about the ad, ruled that viewers would be unfamiliar with the way scientific data was validated.

So Cameron's statement – that the study presented at the WCD showed pentapeptides were effective – would misleadingly encourage them to believe that the findings were supported by "a large scientific meeting", the regulator added. The ASA said the ad must not be broadcast again in its current form.

Cameron, who has published five books and appeared on TV shows including How to Look Good Naked, took over fronting the Olay ads last year from Nadine Baggott, a health and beauty editor for Hello! magazine.

In the ad Cameron says: "So if you're not ready for cosmetic injections, but want dramatically younger-looking skin, try Olay Regenerist with pentapeptides. Women who aren't ready for cosmetic injections constantly ask me to recommend a skin cream that really works. So I was excited when this study, revealed at the World Congress of Dermatology, showed that pentapeptides are effective in reducing the appearance of lines and wrinkles."

The ASA received complaints about the ad over four issues.

Two viewers complained that it implied Olay could deliver the same benefits as injections. The watchdog upheld this complaint, stating that lines delivered by Cameron, such as "women who aren't ready for cosmetic injections constantly ask me to recommend a skin cream that really works", were misleading. P&G said it would include in future ads the line "results not equal to medical procedures".

The regulator said that "many viewers" had complained the ad was misleading and offensive because it impled that cosmetic injections were a "natural or inevitable step" for women as they got older. The ASA rejected these complaints.

Another viewer, a doctor, challenged whether there really was scientific evidence that pentapeptides reduced lines and wrinkles. The doctor also argued that the ad misleadingly implied that the scientific community supported the paper presented at the WCD.

P&G said it had carried out two studies into Olay Regenerist, which showed that the level of pentapeptides in the product "significantly reduced the appearance of lines and wrinkles". One of the studies was published in the International Journal of Cosmetic Science in 2005. The paper on pentapeptides was also presented at the WCD and was "entirely factual," P&G added.

However, the ASA upheld the doctor's two complaints. An expert asked by the ASA to look at the claims made by the Olay ad said there were "methodological gaps in the management of results and interpretation of data presented in the published paper [by P&G]".

The ASA expert added that the study that had been published had not shown that the changes when using pentapeptides were "at a level of significance" to make the claim it reduced the appearance of lines and wrinkles. In the self-evaluation part of the study, test subjects reported no effect for the pentapeptide-containing product.

A second study "in some respects contradicted the results in the published paper" and had also not proved that the pentapeptide product was likely to produce results "visually significant to the consumer", the ASA said.

"Although we acknowledged that, as a moisturising product, Regenerist was likely to temporarily reduce the appearance of lines and wrinkles, we considered that, to substantiate this type of claim the results from the studies should be ingredient specific, perceptible to the consumer and consistently in favour of that claim," said the ASA.

"We concluded that P&G had not provided evidence sufficient to support the claim."

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