Advertising Standards Authority unveils five-year strategy

In the UK, the advertising watchdog Advertising Standards Authority has published its five-year strategy to better control gambling advertising, noting that it intends to focus on tighter regulation and the use of machine learning tools in regulation.

The Authority notes that there is an increasing move online by businesses and advertising following public trends to the medium.

“Online trends are reflected in the balance of our workload – 88 percent of the 7,099 ads amended or withdrawn in 2017 following our action were online ads, either in whole or in part,” the ASA revealed.

Future strategy includes the prioritisation of the protection of vulnerable people and limiting young people’s exposure to age-restricted ads in the gambling sector, the watchdog said.

“We will listen in new ways, including research, data-driven intelligence gathering and machine learning – our own or that of others – to find out which other advertising-related issues are the most important to tackle. We will develop our thought-leadership in online ad regulation, including on advertising content and targeting issues relating to areas like voice, facial recognition, machine-generated personalised content and biometrics,” chief executive Guy Parker said.

“We’re a much more proactive regulator as a result of the work we’ve done in the last five years. In the next five, we want to have even more impact regulating online advertising. Online is already well over half of our regulation, but we’ve more work to do to take further steps towards our ambition of making every UK ad a responsible ad.”

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