ASA unveils new five-year strategy

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) of the UK has officially released its new five-year strategy. The new plan focuses on making the regulation of online ads stricter and using machine learning tools in regulation.

The report points out that businesses are advertising more more more online; people are also spending more time online. “Online trends are reflected in the balance of our workload – 88% of the 7,099 ads amended or withdrawn in 2017 following our action were online ads, either in whole or in part,” detailed ASA.

The strategy includes the prioritisation of the protection of vulnerable people and limiting young people’s exposure to age-restricted ads in the gambling sector.

“We will listen in new ways, including research, data-driven intelligence gathering and machine learning – our own or that of others – to find out which other advertising-related issues are the most important to tackle. We will develop our thought-leadership in online ad regulation, including on advertising content and targeting issues relating to areas like voice, facial recognition, machine-generated personalised content and biometrics.”

ASA Chief Executive, Guy Parker stated: “We’re a much more proactive regulator as a result of the work we’ve done in the last five years. In the next five, we want to have even more impact regulating online advertising. Online is already well over half of our regulation, but we’ve more work to do to take further steps towards our ambition of making every UK ad a responsible ad.”

Lord Currie, Chairman of the ASA concluded: “The new strategy will ensure that protecting consumers remains at the heart of what we do but that our system is also fit for purpose when regulating newer forms of advertising. This also means harnessing new technology to improve our ways of working in identifying problem ads.”

Source: FocusGN