The UK government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) this morning announced the launch of a new ‘Online Advertising Programme’ (OAP) consultation, which will review the regulatory framework covering digital advertising in the UK.
The programme is designed to identify potential harms caused by online advertising – to individuals, to firms, and to society as a whole – and propose areas where new regulations and laws should be introduced to prevent those harms.
These new regulations are likely to be woven into other, wider legislative efforts. For example one harm outlined by the DCMS is the spread of scam ads, and just yesterday the government announced new provisions to crack down on scam ads as part of its upcoming Online Safety Bill.
But the programme is designed to pick out issues and cover businesses which might otherwise be neglected. For example, online platforms are under the scope of the Online Safety bill. The DCMS said that the OAP will also cover advertisers and agencies, ad servers, demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, and publishers.
And the DCMS says that if the evidence supports the idea, a statutory regulator could be appointed to oversee digital advertising, with powers to regulate all of the company types listed above.
“Market participants across the online advertising ecosystem, from advertisers to publishers and all those in between, have a collective responsibility to tackle the harms created to our society, particularly young and vulnerable people,” said Julia Lopez, minister of state for media, digital, and data infrastructure. “The government wants to move away from a model which focuses on holding advertisers accountable, to deliver a holistic, cross-sector approach which looks at the roles of each actor in the ecosystem and how they can facilitate the minimisation of harm.”
Content and targeting in focus
Since the programme is still only just being put out for consultation, it’s not completely clear which specific harms the Online Advertising Programme will end up covering, or the extent of government reforms that will come about as a result. But the DCMS has set some guidelines.
In terms of harms covered, the DCMS says it says most harms covered by the OAP fall into two categories: the content of ads, and the targeting or placement of ads. The former covers things like ads for illegal ads, spam ads, ads which enable fraud, and ads which contain harmful content. The latter includes targeting of age-restricted products towards minors, targeting of vulnerable people (such as targeting gambling addicts with gambling ads), and discriminatory targeting.
These are all harms which primarily affect consumers. But the DCMS also listed harms which impact the industry itself, which would also fall under the scope of the OAP. These include ad fraud, brand safety issues caused by bad placement of ads, and inaccurate measurement.
Many of these issues are currently handled either by self-regulation by the companies themselves or industry bodies, or the Advertising Standards Authority (which lacks much statutory power to enforce its judgements, though it can forward some cases to other regulators).
The DCMS says depending on the evidence, it may choose to take one of three approaches to regulation.
The first would be to stick with the current system of self-regulation. The second would be to continue with a self-regulatory approach, but to provide more “statutory backstops” for the ASA, which would have more powers to prevent harms where the ASA’s powers aren’t sufficient. The third would be to designate a statutory regulator responsible for overseeing online advertising, which would have its own remit and set of powers in order to prevent harms and punish bad actors.
A crack down on ad tech?
No matter which of these three options are taken, it looks likely that ad tech intermediaries will find themselves subject to new requirements.
Advertisers are already held responsible for the content of their ads through the ASA. And the Online Safety Bill is set to place new requirements on online platforms as well. But the DCMS says it is keen to ensure ad tech companies are held to account for their role too.
The government suggested a number of new measures which could be introduced. These could include standardised record keeping to allow regulators to investigate harmful ads; mandating of anti-fraud initiatives like buyers.json and sellers.json; requirements to verify the identity and legitimacy of advertisers; and requirements for SSPs to vet publishers they on-board.
