In the Hot Seat with the ASA's Guy Parker
The Alliance of Independent Agencies is launching its own Compliance Service, providing members with advice on their communications, copy, terms and conditions that will help them comply with industry standards.
To coincide with the launch we welcomed Guy Parker, the CEO of the Advertising Standards Authority (which enforces the CAP and BCAP codes) as the latest guest in the regular Hot Seat series of interviews.
What followed was an enlightening conversation with Clive Mishon, founding director of the Alliance. Here we present edited highlights of the discussion, including Guy’s take on the potential impact of proposed Government restriction of HFSS advertising, Artificial Intelligence, and how ad regulation will affect practitioners over the next five years.
Q> Guy, I have talked about trust, or lack of it, in advertising. But this has started to change for the better in no small part down to the work of the ASA and its advertising campaign. Why do you think that this has had an impact?
Guy> The data that the Advertising Association is publishing... is showing that if you're aware of the ASA and you have a basic understanding that we're there to ensure that advertising plays by the rules, then you are more likely to trust the ad industry, and you're more likely to trust the ads that you see. Significantly more likely... which is why it's so important that we're running our own ads.
We launched the latest burst of our national ASA ad campaign yesterday [10th September], and we've got Comparethemarket on board, so there's now an execution featuring a meerkat, which I'm very pleased about.
Q> Over the last 60 years [the ASA was established in 1962] society has changed a lot and ads that would be complained about, even censored, over this period are totally acceptable now – look at same sex relationships or gender stereotyping. How does the ASA know where to draw the line on these issues and can it be accused of being a censor?
Guy> In these more subjective areas around stereotyping and offence you're always trying to walk that tightrope. We don't want to be a censor, we don't want to be socially engineering, we want to be reflecting society, and society is changing. The challenge on some of these issues - by no means all - is that it's very difficult... because you have two opposing camps in society and they're never going to agree.
Something like gender stereotyping is a bit easier because we tightened up our rules in that area about five years ago. We attracted a bit of criticism at the time because we were a little ahead of the game. But if you look at the rules now they don't attract a lot of controversy because we're in the right place and I'm proud of the work we did there.
In other areas we've loosened up - like swearing and nudity to an extent as long as there's no objectification. That's in line with what most people in our society are happy with and we're constantly checking in through research to tap into what the prevailing views are among the UK public.
Q> We have a new Government - do you expect there to be higher levels of restriction/regulation of communications under this new administration?
Guy> There will continue to be debate about whether more needs to be done and whether that should be left to the ASA system or more legislation is needed. That debate isn't going to change under Labour but where Labour will go we don't know yet. There aren't any big clues in the manifesto.
They've inherited from the previous Conservative administration a ban on advertising for less healthy foods pre-watershed on TV and online... that was put into law by the previous administration but doesn't take effect until October next year and we still need secondary legislation from the new government to tell us how that will operate.
The ASA and Ofcom co-regulating will put the laws in the codes and publish guidance to help the industry navigate this. Whether or not their products count as less healthy foods will be set out by the Government but we'll turn it into rules that marketers can work with and stay on the right side of new code rules.
Q> Everyone is talking about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on our industry and the ASA is an early adopter. How are you using AI to make you much more proactive than reactive?
Guy> We've been using technology for a long time but were very clear back in 2019 that we needed to invest in AI specifically so we put together an AI strategy... and started investing in it at the back end of 2019 and into 2020.
We've now got a data science team... in the last two years it's build our Active Ad Monitoring System... which hoovers up and catches online ads of all sorts - organic, search, influencer, and paid ads across the internet. We're able to get a lot of ads into the funnel...For example, we might be looking at green claims in UK ads by airline companies to see what they're claiming... We'll build machine learning models to help us find these, and then the final part of the system is an internal portal where our human experts can go and look at the latest reports.
When we started using this system in Q4 2022 we were processing about 14,000 ads a month. As of today we're processing three million ads a month and it's just growing exponentially... the numbers are big and give us the confidence that if something significant is going on out there we can probably have visibility of it. The other important point is that machine learning systems are not taking decisions - they're providing reports that are highly likely to break the code on a specific rule and it's our human experts who then view those reports and decide on how to act on them.
Q> At the end of 2023 you launched a new strategy – AI Assisted, Collective Ad Regulation. Without going into the whole plan what should we as practitioners be looking out for in the next five years?
Guy> AI is being used in advertising in various ways and it feels like big money is being invested in that. For example, by global agency groups. Change is going to come quickly and practitioners are going to have to think very quickly about how to keep on top of the risks... There are opportunities but there are risks to be thought through. When it comes to the use of advertising that we regulate - ads and the targeting of ads - we're saying make sure that you have humans checking what's going on. If you don't do that you're really taking big risks.
The whole issue of ageism and older people and depictions in media and advertising is one to watch out for. Dynamic pricing and the Oasis tickets issue is big at the moment but that broader issue of dynamic pricing is going to be around, and things like subscription traps as well.
It's going to be interesting in terms of the work that we and others do on the accessibility side of things. Audio descriptions in TV advertising where you end up with a tension between wanting to make TV ads more accessible to people who are blind or partially sighted but running into a challenge when there's material information that needs to be conveyed in an ad.
