The ASA has published a report about the online supply pathway of in-app ads which harmfully objectify women. It's the first time the ASA has undertaken systematic monitoring of ads in mobile apps. This comes against the background of Ofcom's recent draft guidance on protecting women and girls under the Online Safety Act 2023, and a recent Select Committee report on Women and Equalities Select Committee report about tackling non-consensual intimate image abuse.
The ASA points out that nobody, especially children, should be exposed to ads that reinforce harmful gender stereotypes, especially those that may incite or condone violence against women.
Happily, the ASA found relatively few instances of harmful in-app ads in its monitoring (eight of 5,923 ads served to its four avatars). Less happily, however, those were serious breaches of the rules. The ASA upheld complaints about 11 similar ads in the period 2023 – 2024.
During a three-month monitoring period, it found ads with harmful stereotyping of women as sexual objects, sexual encounters which were implied to be non-consensual and the use of pornographic tropes.
It set out to explore how those ads came to appear and what steps the in-app ad industry could take to reduce the likelihood of similar ads appearing in future. It found that most companies involved in serving in-game ads are taking steps to make sure that ads don't portray women and girls in a harmful way. Where harmful ads did appear, there were varied reasons for this, although the ASA said that all resulted from responsible creative choices by the advertisers.
The report also identified other factors such as misclassification of the nature of the content of the advertised app, which failed to alert the publisher as to the ads' likely content; and non-UK parties' lack of knowledge of UK advertising standards.
There's a particular type of romance story or AI chat app (which contains sexual content) which breaches the CAP Code rules about offence and harm by reflecting that content in ads appearing in apps where people would not expect to see sexual content.
Some parties have already taken steps to proactively review and improve their policies and processes as a result of the investigation.
In addition, CAP has published specific guidance for in-app ads to help advertisers get it right. Stay tuned for news from us about the guidance, which gives examples of the sorts of things to avoid.
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