The Advertising Standards Authority will have new powers from March next year that extend its remit on the internet.
Currently the ASA does have some powers with regard to the internet. These include coverage of advertisements in paid-for space and sales promotions, but from 1 March 2011 the scope will widen to include rules relating to misleading advertising, social responsibility and child protection.
All sectors and all organisations and businesses, regardless of their size, will be required to comply with the UK Code of non-broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (known as the CAP Code).
The announcement of the new powers is
here. Within this announcement is a link to a document which looks in some detail at the new remit and sanctions to be applied.
The remit will cover advertisers own marketing communications at their web sites and marketing communications in other non paid for space under their control. This includes social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Journalistic and editorial content is exempt – unless it is directed at raising money.
The ASA has a range of sanctions which can be applied. Those currently available will be extended into the new area and two additional sanctions have been added. One of these is the removal of paid for search advertising. This requires the compliance of search engines and could be a very effective deterrent. The other is the use of paid advertising by the ASA to highlight an advertiser’s non compliance.
The whole process needs funding, of course, and this is quite an interesting aspect of the system. The ASA does not receive any government funding. Its current activity is paid for by levies on advertising. The levy is 0.1% on display advertising and airtime, and 0.2% on Royal Mail’s Mailsort contract.
That model will continue with the industry paying a 0.1% levy on paid for advertising appearing on internet search engines. It will be supplemented initially with some seed funding from Google.
One has to assume that the ASA’s remit won’t extend outside the UK. So what value do you think it has, in what is, after all, a global sector?