Advertising

Advertising

ASA

ASA stands for Advertising Standards Authority, which is a company who deals with TV adverts if people want to complain about an advert or want to get rid of an advert from off screen. Their role is to ban adverts, which may seem inappropriate to the target audience or even if it does not seem suitable for TV. They will only ban adverts if they are reasons for offence to be caused or if it puts people out of their comfort zone.

 These are the five strategies for the ASA… (http://asa.org.uk/About-ASA/Strategy.aspx)

1 Understanding: We’ll be an authority on advertising and active on issues that cause societal concern.  We’ll be open to calls for regulatory change, acting purposefully and in a timely fashion, while being fair and balanced in our assessment of the evidence and arguments

2 Support: We’ll provide support to advertisers to help them create responsible ads. We’ll increase, improve and better target our advice and training so every business has access to the information and support it needs

3 Impact: We’ll spend more time on matters that make the biggest difference. Focussing on our existing remit, we’ll spend less time tackling ads that cause little detriment to consumers or on the vulnerable. But, where a complaint indicates that the rules have been broken, we will always do something

4 Proactive: We’ll be proactive and work with others. We’ll use a wide range of information to identify and tackle problems to make sure ads are responsible, even if we haven’t officially received a complaint.

5 Awareness: We’ll increase awareness of the ASA and CAP. We will make sure that the public, civil society and the industry know who we are and what we can do, so they can engage with us when they need to, and have confidence in our work. 

 A cap code stands for committee of advertising practice, which is administered by the ASA. The code is enforced by the advertising standards authority who can remove any ads that breach these rules.

  

 

The overarching principles of this Code are that advertisements should not mislead or cause serious or widespread offence or harm, especially to children or the vulnerable.

In the CAP the section about Harm and offence, it says that the advertisement should not be harmful or offensive to anyone. An example of this is if they show a 18+ advert on a children’s TV show this will be banned or removed the that specific channel.

  

In the rules it says that children must be protected from advertisements that could cause physical, mental or moral harm. An example of this is if they show a trailer for a graphical movie on a children’s TV channel for example 50 shades of gray.

Overall they are 33 different sections what you have to abide to allow your advert to be aired. The sections explain in detail on what you can and cannot do. Some advertising agencies ignore these and or may not totally agree which means that they may not use some of these. Which could lead to the advert to be banned from TV or complained about several times.

   

In the advert for E-cigs they showed a women who was describing what she wanted you to do with the E-Cig. In the clip she describes the way sexual activites would take place. She says ‘I want you to get it out, I want to see it, feel it, hold it, put it in my mouth, I want to see how great it tastes, if your going to VYPE, VYPE with VIP.’ The adverts had received 1,156 complaints. The advert shows the women looking directly into the camera. The advert uses what people call sexual innuendo.

In this Iron-bru advert, they mention ‘fanny’ in this advert, which was their childes name. The advert was banned because of inappropriate wording ‘fanny’. The advert received 2,363 complaints all together. The advert was inappropriate, after 1 month 3 weeks and 6 days they removed the advert of TV and replaced it with a different advert.

  

In this Barnardos advert it shows some graphical images of domestic child abuses, which includes name-calling, violence and also people being arrested. Although this advert was not banned because it was scheduled reasonably by the programmers and it used strong images to show what happens to young children behind closed doors. The advert had 840 complaints, which were read, and reviewed regarding this advert but they were not upheld and was still allowed on TV.