The Advertising Association promotes the role and rights of responsible advertising and its value to people, society, businesses and the economy. We represent UK advertisers, agencies, media owners and tech companies on behalf of the entire industry, acting as the connection between industry professionals and the politicians and policy-makers.

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The Advertising Association focuses on major industry and policy areas that have huge ramifications on UK advertising. This section contains our work around public health, gambling advertising, data and e-privacy, trust, the digital economy and more.

Credos is the advertising industry’s independent think tank. It produces research, evidence and reports into the impact and effectiveness of and public and political response to advertising on behalf of UK advertisers in order to enable the industry to make informed decisions.

Front Foot is our industry’s member network of over 90 businesses across UK advertising. It aims to promote the role of responsible advertising and its value to people, society and the economy through a coalition of senior leaders from advertisers, agencies and media owners.

We run a number of events throughout the year, from our annual LEAD summit to the Media Business Course and regular breakfast briefings for our members. We are also the official UK representative for the world’s biggest festival of creativity – Cannes Lions.

Annual Review 2023: Building a More Sustainable Advertising Industry

/ March 8th 2024
Industry News

Matt Bourn, Communications Director

2023 has been the hottest year on record. If you follow the news, you will have seen worldwide warning signs – temperature highs, flooding, damaging winds, freak hailstorms, fires tearing through southern Europe’s usual holiday destinations across the summer and the West Coast of the US. ‘Extreme weather’ is now part of the lexicon and barely a day goes past without some kind of news story recording another ‘extreme weather’ event.

The advertising industry is operating right at the heart of the debate about what needs to be done, experiencing the urgency of demands for action, and seeing a growing number of briefs to help address the challenge of shifting the behaviours of millions and millions of people. The industry, which is essentially a service industry to all parts of our economy, supporting businesses to compete, innovate and support jobs, is tasked with a new brief – to help us all move on from an economy built through an industrial revolution powered by fossil fuels to one that is fully sustainable, run with renewable energy, and providing people with products and services they want and need that are efficient, not wasteful, use of the planet’s resources.

There is no greater challenge facing our industry than meeting this brief in the coming months and years.

You can download a full copy of our 2023 Annual Review here.