Action on Advertising

Action on Advertising          Increasingly, there are more fast food and confectionery adverts on bus stops, billboards and telephone boxes next to schools, which clearly indicates that brands and local stores are simply flouting the rules, hoping no-one will bother to complain, sand safe in the knowledge there are no meaningful sanctions for non-compliance anyway.  However, the more complaints the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) receive, the more chance certain adverts will be requested to be removed, and then in turn we hope this will result in a tighter legislative framework to restrict junk food and HFSS (High Fat Salt Sugar) marketing.

There are rules in place to prevent advertising junk food within 100m of a venue with 25% child audience.  Just to show you that this can make a difference, here’s one we prepared earlier!  This complaint is about a KFC advert outside a school was submitted and was upheld by the ASA, with KFC getting negative press coverage and being told to remove the offending adverts.  So please do keep sending through examples, it all helps make a difference.

HFSS adverts within 100m of a school     We would also like to see a few more examples of HFSS advertising within 100m of a school so we intend to leave this call ‘open’ for another couple of weeks.  However, we now have some further information about the 100m rule:     “The 100m guideline tends to be applied as the distance between the ad and the entrance to the primary school (gates), or children’s centre.  It is however only a proxy guideline adopted by the industry itself for the likely level of child exposure to the advertisement, rather than a hard and fast regulation.  E.g. an advertisement on a bus stop 120m from school gates, if it’s still the nearest bus stop, might still be found to be likely in breach, and it would be good to have a few examples that test the 100m guideline or demonstrate it is inadequate.”

Please submit any information using the following link: https://tinyurl.com/action-on-advertising

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