ASA

ASA site

 

The Advertising Standards Authority is the UK’s independent regulator of advertising across all media. We apply the Advertising Codes, which are written by the Committees of Advertising Practice. Our work includes acting on complaints and proactively checking the media to take action against misleading, harmful or offensive advertisements.
In this section you can find out how advertising regulation works, who our key people are and information about our performance.
The ASA sets the guidelines for advertisers to follow, act on complaints both public and business, they can insist on changes to ads or withdraw them, they are self-regulatory which means the advertisers regulate their own ads and the ASA step in if there are any complaints. An example of the case study of the 'Ship the bed' advert done by Bed world in 2015. The advert got complaints from people saying that it implied bad language and the word 'ship' sounded more like 'shit'. The ASA looked into this and deemed it acceptable to be run but only at times where children would not see it.

The main forms of advertising are:
TV
Radio
Cinema
Public – billboards/ transport
Print adverts – newspapers/mags
Internet – YouTube, Facebook etc

ASA 2011:

The ASA handled 31,458 complaint about 22,397 different adverts. they judged that 4,591 adverts had to be changed or withdrawn, about 25% complained about. 94% of the complaints were from members of the public.