Abstract
This paper demonstrates how the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) governs advertising ethics with and on behalf of its members and stakeholders. Drawing on an archive of 310 non-commercial (i.e., not-for-profit and public) adjudication reports, we highlight the substantive norms and procedural mechanisms through which the ASA governs advertising complaints alleging offence and/or harm. Substantively, the ASA precludes potential normative transgressions by publishing, disseminating, consulting upon, and updating detailed codes of advertising conduct. Procedurally, the ASA adjudicates between allegations and justifications of offence and harm on a received complaint-by-complaint basis, often upon consequentialist grounds. Such consequentialism, we claim, has the effect of normalizing power imbalances between the ASA’s members, on the one hand, and wider stakeholders, on the other hand. The paper argues that, in the context of UK advertising, what Michel Foucault called the right ‘to be or not to be governed like that’ is enjoyed by relatively few subjects. Having demonstrated how UK advertising practices are governed, the paper closes with suggestions as to how they might be governed otherwise.
Highlights
The relative effectiveness of differing models of advertising regulation has been studied in detail (e.g., Boddewyn 1992; Dacko and Hart 2005; Feenstra and González Esteban 2019; Ginosar 2011; Harker 1998; Jones et al 2008; Muela-Molina and Perelló-Oliver 2014; Preston 1983), little is known about how advertising content is regulated
Through an examination of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA)’s policies and practices, we provide a detailed example of the norms and processes through which allegations of offensiveness and harmfulness in noncommercial advertising are regulated
We do not deny that extra-discursive phenomena might explain why this is the case, beyond what we have provided here by way of empirical analysis
Summary
This paper scrutinizes the norms and processes through which allegedly harmful and/or offensive advertising is regulated and governed in the UK. It does this by analyzing six years of evidence drawn from the non-commercial sector.. By routinely playing the risks of private offences off against the rewards of positive public outcomes (Jones and van Putten 2008; Parry et al 2013; see Charry et al 2014; Pratt and James 1994; West and Sargeant 2004), the non-commercial sector provides compelling insights into the systems of governance over which the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) presides. In the spirit of stakeholder marketing, our research allows an insight into the stakeholders’ own descriptions, albeit mediated by the governance of the complaint process which produces the archive analyzed (as will be explained further below)
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