Castrol Loses Appeal on Sludge Claims

Source: Lube Report Blog
By George Gill

BP Lubricants agreed to withdraw its challenged advertising for Castrol GTX motor oil after a National Advertising Review Board panel recommended it discontinue a variety of sludge protection superiority claims in all media.

BP America had appealed the findings last October of the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, which – following a challenge by Pennzoil-Quaker state of sludge protection claims in Castrol GTX advertising – had recommended BP America modify or discontinue the disputed advertising claims.

“We at Pennzoil are extremely pleased that the NARB not only upheld the original NAD decision that Castrol discontinue its ’57 percent better’ claim in television advertising, but also went further and determined that this superiority claim and the claim that Castrol GTX passed the ‘industry's toughest sludge standard’ should be discontinued in all media,” Luis Guimaraes, general manager for Shell Lubricants’ North America marketing, told Lube Report. “We trust that Castrol will act promptly in discontinuing the challenged advertising claims.”

The NARB announced the panel’s decision yesterday. “While we respectfully disagree with the panel’s conclusions, as a strong supporter of the self-regulatory process, BP Lubricants will withdraw the challenged advertising,” BP said in its statement responding to the panel’s decision. The record before the NAD and the panel established that engine sludge should be an important concern for consumers, BP stated, and that car makers and many others in the industry believe minimum standards for sludge protection don’t go far enough. “We are disappointed that the panel felt that the substantiation we placed in the record in this matter was insufficient, and that we did not adequately anticipate the need to provide extensive substantiation concerning the characteristics and relevance of the Mercedes Benz M111 [sludge] test, which is part of the European ACEA industry standard,” the company stated. “We had believed that issue was not in contention.”

According to the panel’s decision report, the record does not establish that the M111 is the “industry’s toughest sludge standard.” The panel said that in addition to relying on a European industry standard in advertising directed to North American consumers, BP America did not submit evidence to establish the M111 test was “tougher” than all other industry sludge standards.

The panel also noted that BP America relied on the results of two tests conducted under M271, a proprietary Mercedes-Benz protocol, on different dates – once on Castrol GTX, and once on a competitive Pennzoil product.

“The information submitted by BP America did not demonstrate that the M271 test on which it relies is an appropriate basis for comparative sludge protection claims,” the appeals panel stated. “The test procedures and protocols are not publicly available, and thus NAD was not able to evaluate the test. In addition, there is no published reference data with respect to the M271 test, no correlation to other tests, no field correlation, no published repeatability or reproducibility statistics, and no way to evaluate the statistical significance of the test results.”