• by Staff Report , August 14, 2013

There’s never been any love lost between Oracle and IBM. For years they’ve publicly bickered about which company has the most magnificent computer servers and related products, often using advertising as the vehicle for their claims. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison famously offered customers a few years back $10 million if they could refute Oracle’s assertion that a certain server product wasn’t twice as fast as a comparable IBM offering. But now the National Advertising Division, the self-regulatory industry body, says that Oracle has gone too far with some claims that the group says Oracle has not backed up with evidence. And the NAD has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the campaigns, asserting that Oracle “has not a made a good faith effort to,” support certain claims or to stop making them. Over the past year or so the NAD has challenged four separate Oracle ad campaigns—at the request of IBM--that stated its servers were faster and generally more wonderful than competing IBM products. The claims, said NAD, were “over broad and unsupported.”  But Oracle has basically shrugged and continued to make the unverified assertions. Earlier this month the NAD said that Oracle’s “repeated failure” to adjust its ad messaging required a look-see into the matter by the FTC and “possible law enforcement action.”  When the FTC comes knocking, companies tend to do a little less shrugging and a little more listening. 

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