This article is intended for all website owners and anyone considering having a website designed. For the first time in the UK, effective from the 1st of March this year (and therefore now in force), the ASA (Advertising Standards Agency) has extended its remit to include online media in its codes, but what does this really mean ?

There has been some publicity informing the public that this code was coming, I initially heard it on a radio station, but I am not sure as to how widespread this communication actually was as I had not heard or seen this on any other media. The first thing to note is that this is an extension of existing codes that have existed for a long time for other forms of media, the code is known as the CAP (The UK Code of Non-Broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing) code. Finding precise information on this is not so difficult, it can be found on the ASA website (links at the end of the document), but translating this information into a real-world understanding is not so easy, particularly thinking of smaller businesses who have neither compliance or advertising resources. To this end I have given my view of how it reads but until actual sanctions are taken by the ASA no-one will really know.

Will this really affect smaller businesses ?

One has to say YES, potentially, maybe! Historically smaller businesses will not have had to worry too much about ASA regulation as advertising budgets, and therefore activity are relatively low across the small business landscape, maybe being linked to printed advertising in popular directories or local/trade periodicals. The marketing landscape is now significantly different for smaller businesses with the cost of ownership of a website being relatively low and far more productive compared to more traditional forms of advertising and therefore anyone using a website for marketing communications (i.e. all of us) will be bound by the same rules that covered the big companies in their non-website campaigns. So yes, smaller businesses will be affected. The unknown is whether or not the ASA will be able to handle a deluge of complaints from the small business competitive landscape or whether they will have to apply some form of de-minimis filtering. The latter is certainly not in place at present in the code and is unlikely to be made public even if it were.

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