Trade group reports controversial Oracle advertisements to FTC

August 02, 2013

An advertising industry oversight group has reported Oracle to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission after the vendor allegedly failed to comply with previous rulings. The National Advertising Division, which is controlled by the Council of Better Business Bureaus, investigated three Oracle advertising campaigns last year after complaints from IBM. Each of the campaigns contained “an overbroad and unsupported comparison between one Oracle product and one IBM product,” the group said in a statement late Thursday. In July 2012, Oracle agreed to pull advertisements claiming that its Exadata database machine was vastly more powerful than IBM’s Power Systems hardware, but said at the time it believed the NAD’s ruling was too broad. “Now, IBM has brought NAD’s attention to a fourth Oracle advertising campaign, featuring the claim that Oracle’s Sparc T5 has ‘2.6x Better Performance’ as compared to IBM’s Power7+ AIX server,” the NAD said. “The advertising in question features the same stark, overbroad IBM-versus-Oracle comparison that NAD recommended against in the three previous cases.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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