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Advertising standards The UK has a gold standard regulatory system – adverts should be legal, decent, honest and truthful and have social responsibility. Sue Eustace, Advertising Association
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) monitors advertising in the UK to ensure that it does not mislead or cause harm. The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) and the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (BCAP) are the bodies that write and maintain the rules that the ASA administer, and both CAP and BCAP need to see robust evidence before they can agree to change or amend the Advertising Codes. The Advertising Association also works to promote best practice within the industry. The ASA operates predominantly on a complaints-based system but will assess any complaint it receives from the public about an advert. The ASA also undertakes proactive monitoring work to check compliance with advertising rules and identify potential problems. This is usually targeted towards sensitive areas and recent work has covered food, alcohol and gambling advertising. If the ASA Council judges that an advert has the potential to mislead the average consumer about the capabilities and nature of a product, it will require the advert to be amended or removed.
There have been several examples in which adverts for beauty products have been banned because airbrushing was seen to potentially mislead consumers as to the capabilities of the product being advertised. However, there has been little success in removing advertisements that feature ultra-thin and/or muscular models, despite a wealth of scientific evidence which demonstrates that exposure to these images is associated with increased body image dissatisfaction and disordered eating behaviours among young people and adults.42 Therefore, it is currently unclear as to what constitutes evidence in the eyes of the regulatory bodies. The Inquiry also heard that the ASA does not require advertisers to consider body diversity within advertising and does not believe it would be practicable or appropriate for a mandatory requirement to exist within the Advertising Codes. Therefore progress in this area is currently a matter for industry to determine.
Understanding the visual world and how it operates is the key skill in the 21st Century, we need to get more sophisticated at it, and to be more resilient to the more toxic aspects of it. Susan Ringwood, BEAT
Reflecting on body image
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