Insights Advertising Standards Authority launches new five year strategy focused on strengthening the regulation of online ads

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The ASA is the one-stop-shop for the regulation of ads across all media. The ASA says that the particular “online” focus of the new strategy responds to the fact that businesses are increasingly advertising online, people are spending more time online, and the pace of change online is contributing to people’s concerns.

In the strategy, the ASA says that it will:

  • prioritise the protection of vulnerable people and appropriately limit children and young people’s exposure to age-restricted ads in sectors like food, gambling and alcohol;
  • listen in new ways, including research, data-driven intelligence gathering and machine learning to find out which other advertising-related issues are the most important to tackle;
  • develop its thought-leadership in online ad regulation, including advertising content, and targeting issues relating to areas like voice, facial recognition, machine-generated personalised content and biometrics;
  • explore lighter-touch ways for people to flag concerns;
  • explore whether its decision-making processes and governance always allow it to act nimbly, in line with people’s expectations of regulating an increasingly online advertising world; and
  • explore new technological solutions, including machine learning, to improve its regulation.

Online trends are reflected in the balance of the ASA’s workload: two-thirds of the 19,000 cases it resolved last year were about online ads. The ASA’s guiding principle is that people should benefit from the same level of protection against irresponsible online ads as they do offline.

As well as strengthening further its policing of online advertising, the ASA says that will continue to ensure standards are adhered to in advertising across offline media, including TV, radio, press, outdoor, leaflets/brochures, cinema and others.

The ASA has recently rebalanced its approach towards more proactive regulation, i.e. intervening before people need to complain about problematic ads. This will continue under the new strategy. To read the ASA’s press release in full, click here.