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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Statement On Freakonomics Podcast ‘Does Advertising Actually Work? (Part 1:TV)’

/ November 24th 2020

The Freakonomics podcast ‘Does Advertising Actually Work? (Part 1:TV)’, includes selected parts of an interview with the Advertising Association President, Keith Weed, where he was making the case for advertising. The podcast is a deeply-flawed and one-sided presentation of a narrative against advertising. It ignores the many hundreds of professional studies into the efficacy of advertising and its use by millions of businesses around the world every day to support growth and job creation.

While it is good to challenge and refine learnings in this area, the implied conclusion that the millions of people who work in businesses and advertising are blindly using advertising because they do not understand what they are doing or know better is simply not true. Companies have access to internal data which they do not share publicly for competitive reasons. It does not mean the data does not exist, as Keith explains.

With all the economic challenges globally it is better to try to understand and leverage the positive impact of advertising on growth and jobs creation than undermine it with superficial one-sided analyses. We recommend anyone wishing to understand more about advertising and how it works to look beyond this podcast to widely available long-standing, proven research and thought leadership. Useful links for interested parties include:

Credos – Advertising’s Big Questions: https://adassoc.org.uk/credos-category/ad-big-qs/

The IPA’s Advertising Effectiveness: https://ipa.co.uk/initiatives/effectiveness

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