The UK advertising watchdog has received a complaint about its own high-profile UK-wide campaign, accusing it of breaking the rules it enforces around misleading marketing.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which investigates whether ads breach UK regulations, is being asked to investigate claims made in its campaign launched in conjunction with household brands including Tesco, Comparethemarket and Lloyds bank.
The campaign uses versions of brands’ famous slogans to highlight its role in ensuring that promotions that run across media including TV, in print, on billboards and poster sites as well as online adhere to advertising rules.
For example, the ad featuring Tesco says: “We regulate ads across all media, including online. Because every little helps.”
Campaigning groups the New Weather Institute, Badvertising and Adfree Cities, which have successfully pursued numerous bans on ads by asking the ASA to investigate, have lodged a complaint claiming that the watchdog’s own marketing is misleading and inaccurate.
The ASA’s campaign, which has run in different iterations over the past few years and was most recently renewed in July, features claims that it regulates ads “across all media” and “wherever you see or hear them”.
However, the campaigning groups argue this is inaccurate and misleading as the ASA’s remit does not cover the regulation of ads in some media where mass audiences can see them.
The complaint says exceptions include ads in shop windows and at point of sale, parts of airports, flyposters, on pitch-side hoardings of sports events on TV and some social media content.
Andrew Simms, a co-director of the NWI thinktank and a co-founder of the campaign group Badvertising, said: “The ASA wants us to think they will protect the public from all toxic adverts, but they are in fact powerless to prevent multiple ads that misinform from going on show every day in the UK.
“It matters all the more that the body responsible for maintaining standards in advertising lives up to them itself. If a regulator publishes its own misleading ads you have a problem.”
The ASA was set up in 1962 as an independent body to self-regulate the UK advertising code and is funded through a levy collected from ad agencies based on media spend.
Last year the ASA secured the amendment or withdrawal of 33,309 ads. Overall, it received 37,284 complaints about 24,015 ads and has introduced artificial intelligence monitoring that led to the ASA processing 28m ads.
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An ASA spokesperson said: “As the independent frontline regulator of UK ads, our ad campaign is clear that we regulate ads in ‘all media’ as opposed to ‘all ads’. As with any other regulator, there is a start and end point to our remit. For obvious reasons, it would not be appropriate for the ASA to investigate complaints about its own ad.”
While the ASA is independent of the ad industry, the ASA Council – which makes decisions on whether an ad has broken the UK rules – is not, as it effectively acts as the regulator’s board. There is no body or organisation to investigate the ASA’s own ads.
Media owners have the option of declining the use of their ad space for ASA campaigns if they feel the content or claims breach the advertising code. The ASA also theoretically has the option of pulling its own campaign, which has been put together using experts at its disposal in the UK advertising code.
The ASA has received complaints about the various ad campaigns it has run in the past. The groups that have lodged the latest complaint are campaigners for total category and sector bans in areas including the climate crisis, gambling, alcohol and junk food and would prefer the ASA to be replaced with a statutory regulator.
Robbie Gillett, a co-director at Adfree Cities, said: “We urge the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to review the ASA’s limited remit and consult with a broader range of groups about how the marketing industries should be properly regulated.”