By Stephen Woodford, CEO, Advertising Association
The UK advertising industry today has demonstrated extraordinary growth, doubling in size since 2019. Alongside this growth, public trust in advertising has reached a five-year high. This success is underpinned by the credibility of our world-leading self-regulatory and co-regulatory system, led by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
That said, we’re now at a critical inflection point.
The ASA is a highly cost-effective regulator for our industry. At an event led by Asbof (Advertising Standards Board of Finance) at Carlton House this morning, a discussion between Credos Director Dan Wilks and the economist Mark Falcon highlighted its immense economic value (a full report on this will be published this summer). While statutory regulators like the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) are expected to demonstrate a minimum 10-to-1 return on taxpayer spend, the ASA’s much wider scope and much lower cost suggests its value return is significantly higher. The ASA creates an advertising environment of fair, honest competition for businesses to innovate, compete, and sell. The level playing field of ‘Legal, Decent, Honest and Truthful’ is vital to advertisers, large and small, to media owners and to agencies.
Here’s the crunch point. The ASA’s funding model, run by Asbof, has remained largely unchanged since 1974. It is heavily reliant on agency-mediated spend, which no longer fully reflects the reality of our modern, digital market and especially the long tail of advertisers and the self-serve model that has grown in recent years.
The ASA is doing extraordinary work to keep pace with technological change, using AI and machine learning to scan and monitor around 60 million ads in 2025 alone. It is harnessing Generative AI for internal efficiencies and working with platforms to deploy direct APIs and work in deeper, collaborative ways. But it cannot maintain this vital, proactive oversight of the whole market without a sustainable financial foundation.
That’s why Asbof’s announcement today of a new industry taskforce to secure the long-term funding for the ASA is a necessary and timely development. I am delighted to see the strength of the industry commitment on display, particularly the substantial interim financial support pledged by Google and Meta, which ensures the ASA’s financial stability while the industry determines a permanent solution.
The Carlton House event brought together the ASA, DCMS, platforms and advertisers and the consensus was clear: the UK’s collaborative dynamic between government, regulator and industry is uniquely flexible, efficient and effective and must be preserved. DCMS rightly views our self-regulation as a success which supports stable economic growth and consumer protection.
But as stakeholders rightly pointed out, we cannot take this system for granted. Therefore, my call is to commit to a renewal of the ‘regulatory contract’ between the industry and our regulator. Our goal over the next year must be to establish a fair, stable, index-linked funding model that will sustain the ASA for the next 10 years.
We must work together to make the CAP codes ubiquitous, extending awareness, understanding, and compliance to include those currently sitting outside the system. By modernising the funding model and renewing our shared commitment, we can ensure the ASA remains independent, trusted by consumers, and fully equipped to protect the healthy future of UK advertising.
