The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has welcomed the gambling sector’s efforts to protect underage individuals by tackling advertising.
The latest monitoring sweep published by the UK advertising watchdog confirmed a considerable decline in underage individuals’ exposure to gambling adverts in the third quarter of the current fiscal year. Previously, the ASA has revealed that the UK gambling industry was one of the worst offenders when it came to adverts that were found particularly appealing by children.
The second monitoring sweep of the ASA covered the period from July to the end of September 2020. In it, the advertising regulatory body identified five betting adverts breaching the age restriction rules. The ads in question were posted by three gambling companies on six different websites. This marked a considerable decline from the previous monitoring sweep of the ASA, which found that 70 gambling ads violated the age restriction rules. They were posted by four gambling companies on eight different websites.
Guy Parker, the boss of the Advertising Standards Authority, praised local gambling companies for making such progress for just a few months. He shared that the advertising watchdog was encouraged to see advertisers from the gambling sector making efforts to become more responsible when targeting their marketing and advertising materials for age-restricted online sites. He further noted that the ASA expects that trend to continue in the months to come.
Advertising Watchdog Hopes the Trend Will Continue in the Project’s Third and Fourth Sweeps
The reduction in the overall gambling advertising rates accessible for children comes after in May 2020 the country’s advertising body revealed that children’s exposure to gambling adverts had declined to 2008 levels.
The so-called monitoring sweep published by the ASA comes as part of a year-long project that aims to guarantee better monitoring and identification of online ads that are associated with age-restricted products such as gambling, alcohol, tobacco and e-cigarettes, etc.
The first report covered the period from April to June 2020 and the advertising watchdog is now working to prevent repetitive breaches that were identified in it. The ASA shared that it did not expect to see much results in the current report as the advertisers could not be notified of the violations until after an assessment of the monitoring data had been provided. Still, an encouraging trend has been registered.
An overall of 127 age-restricted adverts violated the advertising rules, and 44 advertisers placed such ads on 4 YouTube channels and 27 websites. As mentioned above, when it comes to gambling ads, there were 5 age-restricted betting ads from 3 gambling companies that unlawfully appeared on 6 websites.
By publishing a list of websites that are being monitored and directly addressing the advertisers found to have violated the rules, the ASA expects to see an even further improvement in companies’ policy toward age-restricted products advertising in the third and fourth sweeps of the project.
- Author
Daniel Williams
