The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is to extend its digital remit to include marketing communications online covering misleading advertising, social responsibility and the protection of children.  Seen as a landmark agreement the ASA's aim is to further protect children and consumers in line with the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (the CAP Code).  According to ASA Chairman Lord Chris Smith the authority had been unable to deal with the 4,500 complaints about website marketing communications received since 2008 as this area had previously fallen outside its scope.

The body responsible for delivering the CAP Code, the Committee of Advertising Practice followed recommendations from sectors across the UK industry to expand ASA’s area of supervision.  CAP has published full details of the new remit and sanctions (available on the ASA website). In brief these will include:

• Advertisers own marketing communications on their own websites and;
• Marketing communications in other non-paid-for space under their control, such as social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

ASA’s powers have been extended in-line with its new responsibilities enabling the authority to:

• Remove paid-for search advertising – ads that link to the page hosting the non-compliant marketing communication may be removed with the       agreement of the search engines.
• ASA to place paid-for search advertisements to highlight online an advertiser’s continued non-compliance.

Funding will be raised by application of the standard 0.1% levy on paid-for online advertising and similar to existing funding methods in other media.

Initially there will be a six month ‘period of grace’ to allow time to educate businesses and to raise awareness of ASA’s new responsibilities with enforcement commencing on 1 March 2011. More information for interested parties is available from CAP.

According to CAP Chairman Andrew Brown,  “Extending the online remit of the ASA has been a top priority for UK industry over the last couple of years. Our aim has been to extend further in the online world the principles that are already well established in our system, namely those of effective consumer protection and fair competition.”

www.asa.org.uk