The Business School's First Grant Venture Fund provided funding of £3,727 which was used to visit the History of Advertising Trust Archive to collect historical documents written by the Advertising Standards Authority, to recruit a research assistant to help catalogue this large dataset, to gain access to a textual analysis software, and to travel for a workshop with the project’s co-investigator, Dr Chris Miles at Bournemouth University.
Background
The advertising industry’s permission to self-regulate is under threat. UK consumer favourability and trust towards advertising is in long-term decline and an increasing number of voices are calling for a review and/or strengthening of regulation of advertising, particularly in the online environment – see for example the 2022 Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport’s consultation on online advertising.
In the UK, the ASA is the organisation responsible for regulating advertising: it is funded by the advertising industry and it also writes the rules that it seeks to enforce. Since its inception in 1962, the ASA has functioned as the principal argument against the need for government regulation – by demonstrating that the industry can effectively regulate itself, the ASA makes government intervention unnecessary. Often praised as exemplary, the ASA’s efforts in promoting self-regulation stretch across the globe.
Given the crisis of trust in British advertising and the critiques raised against its regulatory model, it is important to explore the ways in which the ASA has promoted and defended its role in protecting the UK consumer from manipulative, harmful, and misleading advertising.
Our pilot study
What we aim to examine in this project are the persuasive strategies and argumentation employed by the ASA over time through a textual, interpretative analysis of the ASA annual reports since their first publication in 1963 to the most recent. These annual reports are documents which represent the public voice of the ASA and one of the most powerful tools of persuasive discourse at its disposal. Specifically, in this funded pilot study, we focused on gathering historical data to contextualise the annual reports within the broader discourse produced by the ASA and developing a proof of concept of the proposed methodology.
We began by visiting the History of Advertising Trust archive to collect data on the various forms of discourses produced by the ASA – this included not only the annual reports, but also ASA’s own advertising and promotional materials, press releases, research reports, monitoring records and monthly case reports. This confirmed to us that no other form of public discourse is available with the same continuity offered by the annual reports. That said, we accessed and gathered a vast amount of (discontinuous) data, which allowed us to understand the different forms of communication the ASA used over time and which will offer deeper insight and context for this study going forward.
We then analysed the very first foundational ASA annual report with a ‘human-powered’ rhetorical analysis identifying the persuasive strategies, metaphors, and framings, followed by a computer-assisted textual analysis exploring dominant concepts and relationships. Our findings reveal that the construction of ASA’s foundational narrative was centred on persuasively projecting power of the ASA to establish its credibility.
Countering issues around legitimacy of industry self-regulation, the reports adopt numerous ethos building strategies, focusing on the reputation, expertise, and independence of its members, and particularly the Chairman, as well as use of endorsements by various bodies within the advertising regulatory space. The celebratory rhetoric around the establishment of the ASA alternates with a more legal or forensic style, used in the attempt to define their role, justify actions, and demonstrate efficiency.
However, our careful reading showed that the argumentation is not always successful, highlighting tensions around the understanding of ASA’s role and relationships with other advertising industry and regulatory bodies, around their independence from the industry, or around the spirit or the letter of their codes.
What next?
Our work to date has revealed how valuable it is to explore the early discourses surrounding the establishment of the ASA as the advertising self-regulatory body in the UK and confirmed our approach to be suitable. It also uncovered a number of questions for further exploration.
Our main next step is to analyse every annual report to identify the primary arguments used in support of the self-regulation model and of the ASA itself.
We also ask:
- How has the discourse changed over time?
- How does the role of the Chairman influence the discourse?
- What can these reports tell us about how the ASA views itself, the readers of the reports, and the advertising audiences or consumers?
- And what are the implications of this for the crisis in trust besetting the industry?
We are excited to continue this work and thank the UEBS First Grant Venture Fund for the support in getting this important project off the ground.
Kristina Auxtova is a Lecturer in Marketing.