Advertising Matters 18.04.19

EASA goes for gold

This week, the AA team has been in Paris for three days of meetings organised by the European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) and its international equivalent, ICAS. This biannual meeting is loosely described as the United Nations of ad associations and self-regulatory bodies (or Olympics, given its marathon-esque qualities) and the group discussed how they “track” new market developments and kept the codes of practice “fit” for purpose in the digital age. Influencers are now in scope with EASA’s Best Practice Guidelines providing a model now being used by 12 self-regulatory bodies – take note Kim Kardashian!

The European Commission, as well as a very witty German Vice Chair of the European Regulators’ Advisory Group, challenged us to demonstrate how self- and co-regulation will provide effective enforcement action and stakeholder support for the AVMS Directive which has recently been extended to video-sharing platforms and is now being implemented in Member States.

We heard how the ICC has updated its Advertising and Marketing Communications Code, first published in 1937. Not quite as prophetic as Nostradamus but still “surprisingly modern” even then in its core values. We heard how the European Digital Advertising Alliance (EDAA) is getting on in making sure that the self-regulatory framework for online behavioural advertising can be adapted to provide consumers with a consent withdrawal tool to address GDPR and how it will work with the IAB consent framework. It will certainly require more than a hammer and chisel to crack that nut!

And we heard how different self-regulatory bodies are responding to national debates about high fat, salt and sugar food advertising in countries from the UK to Canada. Food for thought!

It’s clear that the challenges continue to be many and multi-faceted in the year ahead.

Getting on the Front Foot with Trust

We are gearing up for our next Front Foot breakfast on Thursday 25 April and which will bring industry together to tackle the crucial issue of excessive frequency and bombardment in advertising.

The event is the next step in our mission to rebuild public trust in advertising. Recent research from the industry’s think tank Credos has shown this to be in long-term decline and issues of excessive frequency and bombardment in advertising are key factors in this downward trend. The breakfast will bring our members from advertisers, agencies, media owners and tech companies to discuss potential industry-wide solutions that address the issues.

You can read an article from our Front Foot Chairman Mark Evans on our website where he delves deeper into this issue. In the piece he talks about how as an industry: “We need to find an answer that works for everyone – for the advertiser looking to serve the optimum number of ads, for the agencies providing services to enable this and for the media owners and tech platforms facilitating the delivery. Everybody has their own stake in this, but we all have a shared common goal – to make sure that our collective behaviour does not continue to abuse the public’s trust and cause our advertising to become nothing but noise that consumers actively switch off.”

If you are a member of our Front Foot network, you can join us at the offices of Jellyfish in The Shard to work together with all parts of the industry and raise, discuss and consider solutions to this issue.

To find further information and how you can register your place, email our Events team here.

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