In 2019, Capital One ran a TV commercial with a woman claiming she redeemeded $115,000 in cash back rewards in just one year with her Spark business credit card.
*MOUSE PRINT:
The unreadable fine print says:
The actual amount of cash back will depend on your credit limit, payment history and purchase activity.
Well, this person must have one heck of a credit limit to have earned $115,000 with her two-percent cash back card. In fact, she would have had to have put $5,750,000 on the card that year to earn that kind of rebate.
Fast forward to 2021. Capital One is running a new commercial with another business owner claiming he redeemed $21,000 in cash back last year.
This time the fine print has changed, is more readable, and remains on the screen longer.
*MOUSE PRINT:
Rewards depicted represent higher than average rewards for customers with this card and were accumulated over multiple years. The actual amount of cash back will depend on your credit limit, payment history and purchase activity.
Nonetheless, his very words, “last year, I redeemed $21,000 in cash back… seriously, $21,000” imply that that is what he earned that year when in fact he did not.
We asked Capital One why they continue to advertise what we believe to be misleading cash back claims.
A spokesperson for Capital One replied:
“[Both] commercials speak to redemption stories rather than rewards earned in any particular period, [and] the Happy Howie’s disclosure does further clarify that the rewards themselves were earned over multiple years…”
This implies that the woman in the flowers commercial also earned her $115K over many years.
In not so many words, the spokesperson also referenced a case brought against the bank by Chase on these very issues. In the 2020 decision of the National Advertising Division (NAD) of the Better Business Bureau, the bank was told the fine print on the first commercial was unlikely to be noticed or understood. It also found that the examples shown could not be achieved by over 90% of their cardholders, and that the ad did not state the typical results an average cardholder could expect.
You can judge whether the disclosure the bank made in the second commercial above (which was created after the NAD decision) complied with the recommendations made.
