If you blinked, you may have missed it. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the UK’s “independent regulator of advertising across all media”, has tweaked its codes of practice to include companies’ marketing messages on their own website and across other non-paid-for advertising spaces.

The official guidelines can be seen here.

The ASA already regulates internet advertising in paid-for spaces, such as banner-ads, pop-ups and paid search results. The new ‘tweak’ to the remit now includes companies’ social media platforms – e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – and any other online space that the company controls.

The changes came into effect on Tuesday 1st of March and, it seems, the changes are already causing a little confusion.

For those not too clued-up on ASA, the regulator essentially decide what is and isn’t acceptable across the advertising sphere. In short, it strives to ensure all advertising content is legal, decent, honest and truthful.

blur Group was one of the many parties present at an event last night, organised by digital law experts Osborne Clarke, to provide some guidance on what these new regulations will mean for marketers.

The event was headed up by Nick Johnson, Head of Advertising and Sponsorship at Osborne Clarke, and Stephen Groom, Head of Marketing and Privacy Law at Osborne Clarke.

The panel of experts were:

Nick Stringer: Director of Regulatory Affairs, Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB)
Caroline Roberts: Director of Public Affairs, Direct Marketing Association
Victoria Silberbauer: Deputy Director of Legal Affairs, News International Limited

So after an evening of discussion and debate among leading industry experts, what do the regulations mean?

Well, in some respects more questions were raised than answered, simply because the new regulations are very broad, ambiguous and ultimately open to interpretation.

For example, the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) code, administered by ASA, now includes non-paid ‘Advertisements and other marketing communications’ – no definition is given as to what other ‘marketing communications’ include.

But it will most certainly include social media. And the CAP code specifically mentions company websites.

So, any mis-selling, over-selling or other misleading marketing information included on a company’s website is a big no-no. This could be something as simple as a strapline such as ‘the world’s leading software company’ – unless the company is genuinely the world’s leading software company, this could technically be classed as mis-selling.

This doesn’t mean that ASA will go all out to pick-up on every minor instance of such marketing talk – it has more than enough on its plate at the moment to worry about such innocuous ‘crimes’. And ASA generally only act when a complaint is made, so unless there is a particularly pedantic competitor or customer, not a lot is likely to happen on this front, unless there is a blatant case of false advertising or overselling going on.

In terms of social media, well, the regulations aren’t likely to change all that much in terms of how companies operate. But one of the key questions raised is this: is it under the advertiser’s control?

As such, user-generated content emerged as a key theme from the Osborne Clarke event. So a user posting comments on a company’s Facebook wall might not directly be under the company’s control, but if they don’t delete it then maybe it will.

And if a company commissions users to submit their own videos, as many brands have done as part of Crowdsourcing competitions, will this fall under ASA’s new remit? Possibly not. But most brands will vet all such submissions before publishing anything onto the web, in which case it will fall under the new regulations.

Another key point is whether something is designed primarily to sell something. This is very open to interpretation, as it can be argued that all content associated with any company is ultimately designed to ‘sell’.

Does the content invite the audience to purchase? Blogs are a grey-area on this front, as many companies treat them as editorial content, but it ultimately feeds into the company’s broader marketing strategy.

And this leads us to some of the content that isn’t covered by the new regulations. Such as:

• Editorial content
• News/PR material (why not PR?)
• Corporate reports
• Organic search engine listings
• Sponsorship
• Customer charters and codes of practice
• Investor relations communications
• Heritage advertising
• Marketing communications promoting causes/ideas

Only time will tell the extent to which these new regulations will affect how companies market themselves online. The conclusion from the panel of experts was that all-in-all, not all that much will change.

So if your company retweets a message from one of your followers that is either offensive or gives misleading information about your company, ASA isn’t likely to be on your back. It’s a transient message, and its overall effect will have minimal impact on any sales.

The ultimate goal of these regulations isn’t to nit-pick over whether a company’s Manhattan PO Box address really counts as having an office in New York.

Common sense should prevail, and this is really about stopping rogue web-traders and those out to make a quick buck through giving dishonest.