Regulation of TV Advertising -If you wish to produce a TV advert and not run the risk of having it banned and therefore wasted, a lot of precious money down the drain, you need to know how adverts are regulated. As I'm doing a promotional packaging revolving around types of advertising, this is compulsory information for me to know. As such I'll be looking into regulation as part of this post, plus its going to help out in the theory side of my work, as Regulation is the topic of interest.
To start off with, all mainstream Media formats are regulated in some way, and regulators differ from country to country. In Britain the film industry has the British Board of Film Classification, with its film rating system e.g. Universal, PG, 15 and 18. The newspapers and press currently have the Press Complaints Commission, with its editors code of practice, although now the system is being revised and possibly replaced with a new regulator, due to the phone hacking incidents by the News of World.
Similarly the industry of advertising now has one main regulatory body, the Advertising Standards Authority, or ASA, which regulates almost all varieties of advertising. Naturally it will be the topic of interest.
The ASA is self-regulating, and it doesn't receive any government funding, instead getting revenue from a levy set up to provide a cut of money from all advertising space, which was initially set up to help the ASA promote itself.
All of the well known forms of advertising are regulated by the ASA. Initially it was just non-broadcast forms of advertising, whilst Ofcom handled broadcast advertising. Now however the ASA covers both broadcast and non-broadcast forms of advertising. As of more recent times this has been extended to internet advertising as well. The codes used by the ASA for internet ads don't differ at all from advertising on other media platforms. They're regulated under the same guidelines.
The ASA has four main standards that it maintains for the adverts that go through it. They are that ad's message has to be:
- Legal
- Decent
- Honest
- Truthful
At its core is a Code of Conduct - The British Code of Advertising Practice, set up initially by the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP), and has since been updated at least 12 times to suit the changing formats of advertising, particularly the ever more prominent forms of online ads. The ASA was also made by CAP to uphold the code as its adjudicator.
The way the ASA regulates ads is based on complaints about ads that they receive. Not one complaint is ignored, and once received the ASA conducts a full investigation of the advert and refers it back to its creators to ensure the ad sticks to the regulation standards, and also its four main aims. Based on what they find the ASA choose to either uphold the complaint or withdraw it, but one comment is enough to ban an advert if it gets upheld.
Complaints generally, as in 62% of the total complaints received, are due to adverts that make misleading claims about their products. Other issues that are brought up include discrimination, sexuality, disability, sexualisation, particularly of women, being used to sell products, religious icons being used casually, and distasteful or inappropriate imagery being used, a good example being the clothing company known as Benetton, which has a history of using shocking imagery to promote their products.
As a country Britain has some of the strictest codes on advertising in the whole world, but out of the thousands of adverts that are shown in the media each year 97% of them comply with the ASA's codes. That also includes 99.7% of Alcohol ads and 99% of game ads, which is a very dependable number. It means that any inspiration I may have taken from game ads is most likely legitimate with the advertising standards.
Advertising Today -
This next part is more of a short essay based on my observation, but really that's where research sources come from; looking at someone else's observation of a particular topic and then using it to back up your own points.
I'll still be using some outside sources to back up the work but I think that I, as an active consumer of different media types, can have a valid observation of the topic in question as well. I like to think I have learnt something about the media after growing up with it for 18 years.
The funny thing about this next part is that I initially wrote it as part of my work for my main practical piece. I realised when I read it though that it would work far far better as a piece of advertising research.
From my experience when I was younger and television channels were the main form of media, adverts were commonplace between the various kids shows I watched. As I grew older though and computer viewing started to grow stronger, I began to watch less and less television. Now I'm at the point where I barely watch it at all. What's filled the space then? Where does my media consumption come from? This blog is a clue.
Now I've seen a fair few adverts in my time, whether they be for upcoming games or not, and although the brief falls under television advertising, in this day and age new media advertising is by far and away the more popular form of advertising.
In the past, when TV programmes were limited to a specific spot, at a specific time, on a specific day, and if you missed them you couldn't easily catch it again. Today we have IPlayer to catch shows, that have aired, any time we choose, provided it's within a certain time frame. We also have Lovefilm and Netflix as two new means to watch films anytime we wish, whereas before we had to go out and buy a DVD or go to the cinema to see a film.
Oh, and Youtube....
TV Adverts can be classed as films in their own right because, like TV programmes, their revenue comes from the number of people who watch it. The big difference however is that people are rarely looking to watch the adverts themselves. To the vast majority of people ads are an inconvenience. They're also incredibly common and competition to get an advert out to a large audience, let alone promote its production, is fiercer than a lot of other types of media.
This puts broadcasting advertisers under a good deal more pressure to get their adverts out effectively. They know they don't have the same luxury of being actively looked for, like TV programmes and films are, so instead they play on the success of other broadcasting media. This means they have to be very precise where exactly they put their adverts to gain the greatest amount of views. Even if an advert hasn't been appreciated it's still been acknowledged, and even that can be enough for the advert to do its job of promoting its product.
In this day and age then, with Youtube, Netflix, Lovefilm and IPlayer and other digital video services as the main sources of broadcasting Media, adverts too need to keep up with the times in order to do their jobs, and this has begun to show through. IPlayer, Youtube, and other sources like Dailymotion are chock full of advertisements.
One other thing to consider is the inclusion, on most adverts of this format, of a skip button, allowing the ad to be skipped entirely after a certain amount of time. In the past adverts had to be put up with, as there was no way around them. Now though that has been almost completely gotten rid of. This puts tremendous pressure on advertisers, not only to create something legitimate with regulation and get it into a slot for advertising, but also to make it interesting and unique enough to make people want to keep watching the ad till the end, even though there's the option of skipping.
Certainly from my experience there are very few adverts that I haven't skipped over at the first opportunity. There are only three I can think of off the top of my head, two of them promoting music or including a particular track, which I later went to download, and another that I talk about in my ideas stage for my main piece.
In this day and age now, adverts are still subject to annoyance, and they're certainly not gone. Even with changes to popular media and introduction of newer formats, ads have kept up and taken advantage of them. For the most part now however, thanks to the skipping function of many adverts, its up a great deal more to us what adverts we choose to watch and which we just can't bother with. Even small snippets of adverts can be enough to get the message across, but now the pressure has really been raised to make an advert that's actually worth watching.
And that's it. Thanks for viewing and we're almost there now. Not much left. Look forward to the final parts of my work very very soon.
Until then thanks for viewing and stay updated.
One other thing to consider is the inclusion, on most adverts of this format, of a skip button, allowing the ad to be skipped entirely after a certain amount of time. In the past adverts had to be put up with, as there was no way around them. Now though that has been almost completely gotten rid of. This puts tremendous pressure on advertisers, not only to create something legitimate with regulation and get it into a slot for advertising, but also to make it interesting and unique enough to make people want to keep watching the ad till the end, even though there's the option of skipping.
Certainly from my experience there are very few adverts that I haven't skipped over at the first opportunity. There are only three I can think of off the top of my head, two of them promoting music or including a particular track, which I later went to download, and another that I talk about in my ideas stage for my main piece.
In this day and age now, adverts are still subject to annoyance, and they're certainly not gone. Even with changes to popular media and introduction of newer formats, ads have kept up and taken advantage of them. For the most part now however, thanks to the skipping function of many adverts, its up a great deal more to us what adverts we choose to watch and which we just can't bother with. Even small snippets of adverts can be enough to get the message across, but now the pressure has really been raised to make an advert that's actually worth watching.
And that's it. Thanks for viewing and we're almost there now. Not much left. Look forward to the final parts of my work very very soon.
Until then thanks for viewing and stay updated.
No comments :
Post a Comment