advertising matters 08.03.19

Restoring public trust in advertising

On Tuesday, at the ISBA Annual Conference, our President, Keith Weed, launched our new Trust Paper – a plan to reverse the decline of public trust in advertising, and a call to action to UK advertisers to join us in our mission.

The Trust Paper contains new research from Credos into the main reasons why public trust in advertising has fallen over the past few decades, from around 50% favourable in the early ’90s to just 25% in 2018. It identifies six overarching factors affecting public perceptions of advertising, from bombardment to unhealthy advertising.

The report also highlights five actions that the advertising industry should undertake in order to regain trust, and sets out how success can be measured:

1. To reduce advertising ‘bombardment’
2. To reduce excessive advertising frequency and re-targeting
3. To ensure that the ASA is “best in class”
4. To ensure that data privacy matters
5. To show that advertising can drive social change

For more information head over to our website or to request a copy of ‘Arresting the Decline in Public Trust in Advertising’, please email Chris Sutcliffe.

The launch of the report has been covered widely on social media and also in the press, including in Campaign, Marketing Week and Little Black Book.

HFSS: Setting our industry’s perspective

On Thursday, we published a report setting out the advertising industry’s perspective on the challenge of childhood obesity in the UK.

The report recognises that obesity is a serious problem, impacting the health, well-being and life outcomes of the nation’s children, but shows this is a complex social issue, with child obesity levels strongly affected by lifestyle and geography. It also includes new data showing that children’s exposure to HFSS advertising has dramatically reduced over recent years.

The report highlights that:

• UK advertising rules are among the strictest in the world and already restrict the advertising of HFSS food or drink products in and around TV programmes commissioned for, or likely to appeal to children. The rules for all other media, including online, restrict HFSS ads where under 16s make up more than 25% of the audience.
• The average child sees around 11.5 seconds of HFSS advertising on TV and online in a day, which amounts to about one hundredth of one percent of a child’s day.
• It would be expected that the dramatic reduction in exposure to HFSS advertising over the past 10 years would have had a more significant impact on child obesity levels.

Our Chief Executive, Stephen Woodford, commented: “Further restrictions on advertising are not the silver bullet for rising childhood obesity.”

The report has secured widespread coverage across the media landscape including Campaign, The Drum, ITV, MailOnline and City A.M.. The Sun and the Guido Fawkes website also featured pieces supportive of our position. You can read the full release on our website here. Separately, our Comms Manager, Matthew Evans, appeared on Good Morning Wales, BBC Radio Wales, on Tuesday, talking about HFSS ad restrictions. You can listen here from around 1 hour 10 minutes in.

Shout out for SHIAF

Kicking off Promote UK’s Export Month, a month of activity highlighting exports of UK advertising services around the world, this week, our Chief Executive Stephen Woodford and Janet Hull OBE, Promote UK Chair and IPA Director of Marketing Strategy, have been in China at the Shanghai International Advertising Festival (SHIAF) with DIT.

While in China, they have been meeting Chinese agency peers and brands to explore new opportunities to grow links and business.

The week included a UK/China Global Brand Forum event, which introduced new UK agencies to China, as well as a reception for China agencies and a dinner for China brands. The mission to Shanghai followed the signing of an MoU on behalf of the AA and IPA by Stephen in November 2018. Central to the agreement is an AA/IPA/SHIAF partnership that will bring more UK advertising expertise to China in the future and more agencies and production companies collaborating with a growing number of their Chinese agency peers and brands.

The next key event in Export Month, following SHIAF, is South by Southwest, which starts today and ends on 17 March. Tomorrow, the UK Creative industry will be taking over the British Music Embassy in Austin, Texas, for a series of talks and debates on creativity, advertising and more trust in trust itself. Within this, there will be a session discussing recent research by our think tank Credos, and McCann Worldwide, on public trust in advertising and how the situation compares with the US. Read more in Campaign US here.

Stephen is pictured with the first UK winners at SHIAF, VCCP for easyJet Look&Book.

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