The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) will launch ts new Codes of Practice that govern all forms of advertising, marketing and communication activities for off-line (such as print, known as the CAP Code) and for broadcast (known as BCAP Code) on Wednesday 1 September.

The guidelines provide a regime that is largely self-regulated although there are sanctions that can be applied for transgressions and the courts treat the Regs as "quasi-legal" although strictly speaking they are not "laws".

If you can't wait until Wednesday 1 September, the Codes of Practice can be downloaded immediately from the ASA web site.

Perhaps less well trumpeted and potentially more far reaching is the net being cast by the ASA to include UK web sites from next year.

I was meeting my colleague and friend Torin Douglas, the BBC's Media Correspondent earlier today at BBC Television Centre who will be reporting on this news story very shortly.

The implications for attempting to regulate marketing and communications on the internet are fraught with pitfalls - the key one being the limits of the ASA's jurisdiction on web sites that are marketing and communicating to UK consumers but are hosted on servers outside of UK territory.

The proposed self-regulatory rules on marketing and communication content on UK web sites won't take place until next year at the earliest and are likely to reflect the common sense approach to taste, decency, transparency and honesty that are enshrined in CAP and BCAP Codes so the vast majority of brands won't be bothered by this new layer of regulation - however light.

However, like CAP and BCAP, there will be a raising of the bar in terms of standards expected to be observed in relation to marketing and communication to children, for example, on UK web sites.

There's likely to be a hue and cry by civil liberty groups eager to mount a legal challenge to the legitimacy of ASA in extending its reach to the internet because as any media lawyer will tell you, no one body can claim to regulate the internet. It does seem such an action to stop brands from marketing and communicating in a certain way could smack of censorship as well as an infringement of the Human Rights Act and the article protecting freedom of speech.

 

 

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