Whenever the police are required to investigate themselves, it never seems to go well. Questions of trust and conflict of interest are unavoidable.
Depending on circumstances, at least sometimes it falls to a different force to do the investigation. But, there seems to be no, even relatively more independent option, should the UK adverting watchdog have to investigate its own ads.
That hypothetical concern became real when the New Weather Institute and Badvertising campaign – both of which I am part of – asked the UK advertising regulator, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), to investigate its own ads for allegedly breaching the rules around misleading advertising, which it is charged with enforcing.
Big claims
The result of doing so is surprising, disturbing and reveals a hole at the heart of the system. Extraordinarily, it exposes a situation in which the regulator itself is apparently living beyond the reach of its own standards, codes and rules.
Ads seen on billboards and in print in July-August 2025 promote the ASA’s ability to regulate ads “across all media”, with one reading, “We regulate ads, wherever you see or hear them”. Another reads “The ASA makes sure UK ads stick to the rules. Simples”.
The watchdog’s ads include the ASA’s logo alongside imagery and slogans of brands including Tesco, Compare The Market and Lloyds Bank. The ads attempt playfully to reference the well-known brands’ corporate catch phrases familiar from their own marketing.
Our complaint says that the ASA’s actually quite limited remit means, in fact, that it cannot regulate ads seen and heard by large audiences daily, across various physical and online media.
According to the ASA’s own information on its remit, it cannot regulate any fly-posted ads, ads in shop windows or at point-of-sale, ads on an advertiser’s own vehicles, and those by companies based outside of the UK if they are on platforms also headquartered outside of the UK.
Limited remit
Also, says the watchdog’s remit for regulating social media advertising, it does not act “when a brand publishes a communication on their own website or social media page” when this isn’t paid-for content.
Badvertising’s complaint notes that although a large proportion of companies’ social media posts and website content act to build a company’s brand, a recognised form of advertising, this is outside of the ASA’s remit.
This means that substantial volumes of advertising that are clearly visible in the UK are beyond the scope of the ASA, and therefore not regulated by them.
Robbie Gillett, a co-director at campaign group Adfree Cities told The Ecologist: “The ASA is structurally unable to address the cumulative impacts of harmful advertising.
“It has no power to levy financial penalties and some major polluters continue to publish misleading ads despite previous ASA rulings against them.
“We urge the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to review the ASA’s limited remit and consult with a broader range of groups about how the marketing industries should be properly regulated.”
Failure to act
The complaint draws on illustrative examples, detailing several previous complaints by Badvertising and campaign group Adfree Cities that were rejected by the ASA on the grounds that the ads were placed in public or online spaces that are not within the watchdog’s remit.
This included an advert for Qatar Airways reading “Fly Greener”, which the ASA said it was unable to investigate.
The regulator said the Qatar Airways ad was on the pitch-side hoardings of a sports event, and thus “material derived from sponsorship”, which is not in the ASA’s remit.
The hoarding, we argue, is clearly a form of advertising and indistinguishable from it. The pitch side advertising was viewed by a television audience of millions.
The ASA also said it was not able to investigate a large digital billboard advert for the airline Easyjet, that read “working towards net zero every day”, since the billboard was in the airline’s designated space within an airport.
ASA also said it could not investigate another Easyjet ad promoting carbon offsetting schemes, which are widely discredited and the airline has since abandoned, because it was already conducting a review into misleading green claims by the travel sector.
Other complaints concerning ads for oil company BP, and banks Standard Chartered and Barclays were not investigated, with the ASA saying it was either already investigating a firm in the same sector, or undergoing a review of an industry’s advertising.
Excuses
Yet another limit on the ASA, meaning that they do not regulate ads “wherever you see or hear them”, is that the watchdog cannot act on any adverts for an advertiser that is not based in the UK, if they are hosted on a platform that is not based in the UK, even if that platform is easily and widely viewed within the UK.
A complaint by Adblock Bristol raised concerns about a paid-for advertising video making misleading green claims by American oil giant Chevron, posted and promoted on the social media platform Twitter.
The ASA was unable to investigate this advert as it was not in their remit: “Our remit only allows us to investigate ads if the advertiser is based in the UK or are using a UK third-party platform for the placing of the ad in question.“
The ASA’s ads have a playful tone but one which seeks to convey authority, giving an impression of the ASA as a powerful, comprehensive and effective regulator.
Yet its multiple constraints in scope, weak enforcement powers and often slowness of action, mean this is strongly misleading.
The wording of one ad, “The ASA makes sure UK ads stick to the rules” is also heavily contradicted by the work of the Greenpeace investigative journalism team, Unearthed, which found that brands including Virgin Atlantic, Renault and Aqua Pura were repeating misleading green claims despite previous ad bans.
Broken system
Badvertising previously published a report scrutinising the regulator’s efficacy, particularly in relation to curbing advertising’s contribution to climate harms through greenwashing and the promotion of heavily polluting goods.
The report analysed the ASA’s remit and a record of complaints made to the regulator.
The key finding was that any advert that is investigated by the ASA can take more than a year to reach a result – this means a ruling could be announced long after the ads had been seen and the campaigns ended.
The report also noted that many adverts are simply not investigated as they are deemed to be outside the ASA’s remit. and and that the ASA cannot penalise advertisers legally or financially, meaning advertisers are often undeterred from breaching ASA rulings in future marketing.
The report also observed that the ASA is self-funded and insufficiently independent from the industry it regulates.
Dr Victoria Harvey, an academic researcher in institutional change in the advertising sector, said: “I was shocked when I saw these ASA adverts at tube stations in London.
“My research finds the ASA only regulates a portion of ads, certainly not ‘wherever you see or hear them’. Also they have no meaningful ability to ensure ads adhere to their codes.
“These ads are therefore highly likely to breach advertising codes designed to prevent misleading advertising.
“This complaint calls the regulator’s independence into question; will the ASA investigate its own ads? The suggested affiliation to big brands such as Tesco and Compare the Market in the ads is wholly inappropriate behaviour from a supposedly independent regulator, and highlights once again that the ASA is far too close to the industry it regulates.”
Serious
Within 24 hours of filing the complaint to the ASA, I had an official response. It was the fastest decision by far that I have yet experienced. I was told, curtly, that the regulator would not be investigating its own ads.
The reason given was this would represent “a clear conflict of interest”. Understandable, perhaps, but surely that matter wouldn’t be left there?
If not the ASA, then surely there must be another way to hold the regulator to the same standards and rules as everyone else?
Pointedly, however, there was no referral to another body or suggestion of another course of action. As it seemed obviously untenable for the ASA to be ‘above the law’, and their own law at that, I wrote back asking who else we could make the complaint to in order that they be held accountable to the same advertising standards they oversee.
The response again came unusually quickly. It was brief and said: “There is no other body who this can be referred to”. So, there it is, adverts by the watchdog responsible for regulating adverts cannot be regulated. On one hand it is funny, but it is also deadly serious.
Rules
The ASA wants people to think it will protect the public from all toxic adverts, but it is in fact powerless to prevent multiple ads that misinform from going on show every day in the UK.
We need effective regulation of advertising, and tobacco style controls on ads for the most harmful, polluting products.
It matters all the more that the body responsible for maintaining standards in advertising lives up to those standards itself.
Seeing an ad regulator publish its own misleading ads merely reveals how broken is the current model of largely voluntary, self-regulation of an industry that daily promotes the kind of high carbon lifestyles that undermine all our futures.
This Author
Andrew Simms is co-director of the New Weather Institute, assistant director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, co-founder of the Badvertising campaign, coordinator of the Rapid Transition Alliance, an author on new and green economics, and co-author of the original Green New Deal. Follow on Bluesky @andrewsimms.bsky.social or Mastodon: @[email protected].