ASA urges industry to improve age-related ad restrictions after latest avatar results
Regulator exploring “more prescriptive measures” after avatar technology was used to decipher ad patterns and audience consumption
The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has disclosed the latest findings from its latest proactive monitoring sweep.
Observations from the regulator have included the significant use of avatar technology to assess the distribution of adverts for gambling, as well as alcohol and high fat, salt or sugar (HFSS) products.
Often these products are displayed across websites and YouTube channels, subsequently attracting an audience of a range of age groups of mostly adults, which accounted for 75-90% of viewers.
The technology used for this enables advertisers to target subsets of the sites’ audience, which is based on factors such as age, location and online browsing interests.
Avatar technology was introduced to identify the trends in how the ads are delivered to end-user adults, children and unknown viewing age groups.
The avatars are then constructed to reflect an online browsing profile after visiting 250 web pages on both desktop and mobile devices twice a day.
The ASA has designed six uniquely age-categorised avatars, which received 27,395 adverts published on 250 sites.
These were monitored over a three-week period in order for the ASA to come to a realistic conclusion of how adverts are consumed.
It was found by ASA that gambling adverts were served in broadly similar numbers to both adult and child avatars, casting doubt on the industry’s use of age-gaiting technology for online media consumption.
A neutral ASA avatar clearly distributed fewer gambling-related adverts across the mixed-age media.
Yet advertisers are not allowed to deliver adverts to age-restricted audiences to media outlets where children are the audience, or make up 25% of the audience.
ASA CEO Guy Parker said: “We call on advertisers to make better use of targeting tools to minimise children’s exposure to dynamically served age-restricted ads.
“And we call on third parties involved in the distribution of these ads to ensure the data and modelling on which those tools rely are as effective as they can be.
“Finally, we will be exploring whether the report should lead to more prescriptive measures relating to dynamically-served age-restricted ads, “ he added.
The ASA, which has regulated UK advertising since it was founded in 1962, believes that advertisers should be prioritising the tools available to target adverts for certain products away from children.