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Advertisers and social media sites in the UK are taking “purposeful steps” to further limit children and young people’s exposure to age-restricted adverts for products such as gambling, according to the country’s advertising watchdog.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) published a follow-up report on July 19 to its The 100 Children Report published in November 2022, which provided insights into the adverts that UK children are exposed to on their mobile phones and tablets.
The report and previous work “shows that overall advertisers including gambling operators are taking their responsibilities seriously and working to ensure their ads avoid reaching children on social media”, a spokesperson for the ASA said.
“That being said, there is always more work to be done, and we urge gambling businesses to take the contents of our monitoring reports seriously. It’s vital that they continue to use all the tools at their disposal to target their ads away from under-18s on social media.
“They must ensure their ads aren’t of strong appeal to young people, and should market their products responsibly,” the ASA told VIXIO GamblingCompliance.
The ASA said its research will support ongoing child safety initiatives around age verification measures.
“We recognise there is more work to do on effective age verification measures, and the ASA will continue to work with advertisers, agencies and platforms to ensure children are protected online,” the follow-up report stated.
As part of the report, social media giants YouTube and Meta, as well as 30 unnamed advertisers, were contacted by the ASA in order to address instances of “clearcut breaches” of ad rules and provide information on how to address them.
These breaches of the advertising code included age-restricted ads being delivered to the social media accounts of nine children on the ASA panel who reported their registered age as 17 or younger.
The majority of these ads were for gambling companies (37).
Social media companies said they expressly excluded gambling ads from being targeted as part of ad campaigns and some advertisers even widened the scope to also exclude people aged 18-24.
“Gambling operators informed us that, by virtue of being officially categorised on the platforms as a provider of gambling services, their advertising account configurations and campaign settings do not enable them to target users registered as 17 or younger,” the ASA report said.
