Upholding a complaint about a recent poster produced by the airline which claimed the company is "connecting the world" and "protecting the future", the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said "robust substantiation" was needed to support the claims.
The advert showed an image of the front of an aircraft in flight, with the underside of the jet represented by an image of the earth from space.
The ASA challenged whether the ad gave a misleading impression of the advertiser’s environmental impact – and concluded absolute environmental claims must be supported by a "high level" of substantiation.
In response, Lufthansa said the ad contained a clear hyperlink to a website which formed part of its wider "#MakeChangeFly" campaign.
The purpose of the ad and wider campaign, the carrier said, was to address the need to reduce the impact of flying on the environment and making consumers aware of how Lufthansa was achieving that.
They said the tagline was open to interpretation, but in conjunction with the imagery it would not be understood as an absolute promise about their service, especially one linked to the environment, that their services caused no harm to the environment.
However, the ASA considered the statement "protecting its future" was likely to be interpreted as an environmental reference to how Lufthansa’s approach to aviation was protecting the future of the world, given that this text appeared immediately after the text "connecting the world" line.
"We noted Lufthansa’s comments that the campaign was based on specific steps taken to be more environmentally friendly, including aspirations to become carbon neutral by 2050 and to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030," the ASA said in its ruling.
"However, the claim "protecting its future" was not qualified with this information. We considered the claim was likely to be understood by consumers to mean that Lufthansa had already taken significant mitigating steps to ensure that the net environmental impact of their business was not harmful.
"We concluded that, because the basis of the claim had not been made clear and it had not been adequately substantiated, the ad breached the code."
