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Does the ASA really represent viewers' opinions?

Fundraising | 13 Mar 2015

Last month the Advertising Standards Authority published figures regarding 2014’s TV ad complaints, Stephen Cotterill asks whether the ASA is truly reflective of public opinion.

According to an Advertising Standards Authority report released in February, two of the ten most complained about adverts in the UK last year featured charities. You can probably guess that one of them was Sainsbury’s Christmas advert, run in connection with the Royal British Legion, which retold the historical Christmas Truce on the Western Front in 1914 and received 823 complaints, coming fourth in the overall ranking.

Although that is quite a few outraged viewers, the more telling figure is online. At press time, the Sainbury’s ad had been viewed 16,900,823 times on YouTube.

Although the ASA did not investigate the campaign further and it wasn’t banned, the resultant web reaction raises a debate about whether the ASA as a governing body is truly representative of public opinion.

The other charity ad making the ASA’s top ten was one by Save the Children featuring a woman giving birth, which garnered 614 complaints for showing “distressing, offensive” scenes. The online figure of 210,302 views is not so impressive, but another ad by the same charity depicting a young girl’s life devastated by war has received 45,490,232 viewings. That campaign was never shown on television.

Considering that the primetime viewing figures for even the most popular of TV events, such as the New Year’s Eve Fireworks and I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, are roughly around the 14 million mark, the potential online audience for charities is much more impressive and perhaps a truer representation of whether the campaign is hitting the right note with funders or not. In our news analysis on shock tactics this month, creative director at Good Agency Rueben Turner makes a similar point, saying that the online audience will very quickly let a charity know if a campaign is causing offence through online forums, chatrooms and comment threads. This is much more immediate than any insight the ASA can give.

Of course a body does have to exist to safeguard the advertising industry, but it is also well within the charity sector’s ability, and perhaps obligatory remit, to monitor activity online and self-censor if necessary to avoid negative feedback. Some campaigns may get fuel from television exposure, but with the continuing growth of high-speed broadband connectivity and an increasingly vocal online community, TV’s potency as a bellwether of taste and popularity may well be on the wane and the ASA’s job may be becoming a little more complex. 

Directory: Royal British Legion | Save the Children | The Good Agency
Who's Who: Stephen Cotterill