ASA Reports Decreasing Exposure to Gambling Ads in Minors

Every two years, the UK’s independent advertising regulator, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), publishes a report regarding children’s exposure to TV ads.

The authority has recently made its latest report for 2024 public, and the numbers are looking good. 

Kids’ Exposure to TV Gambling Ads on a Decreasing Trend 

The idea of the report came as a necessity to identify industry trends and ensure all of ASA’s scheduling restrictions are working to the benefit of accurately limiting children’s exposure to potentially harmful products like alcohol and gambling. 

The authority that constantly safeguards vulnerable audiences published its last TV ad child exposure report in 2022.

Now, the latest version of the report shows that minors’ exposure to televised alcohol and gambling ads has continued to drop.

For the first time since 2019, the authority provided the numbers related to children’s exposure to products high in fats, sugar, or salt (HFSS). The numbers spoke of a two-thirds decrease since 2016.

The authority also reported that the exposure to TV gambling ads has “remained fairly stable at lower levels for the past five years” between 2010 and 2023.

Following the same 14-year period between 2010 and 2023, ASA says under-16s exposure to gambling advertising on TV has decreased by two-fifths.

In other words, the news is reassuring as it indicates that children are watching a smaller number of ads revolving around gambling, alcohol, and HFSS products on TV. 

This means the downward trend reported in previous years has not been interrupted while also showing children’s exposure to all forms of TV ads has been following the same descending trend. 

To get into more detail, children’s exposure to TV gambling ads went down from 3.0 ads per week on average in 2010 to 1.8 ads per week in 2023. 

Children watched just under one TV ad promoting a gambling product on average for every six gambling ads viewed by adults last year.

Northern Ireland reported a gambling TV ad child exposure of 1.7 in 2023 while Scotland reached 2.3 weekly ads.

Optimistic and Proactive 

While acknowledging the ongoing decrease in the number of children exposed to age-restricted TV ads, the ASA has also admitted it is mostly a consequence of the constantly changing media habits adopted by minors.

For this reason, the authority has announced it will keep doing proactive work to assess ads seen online. 

The authority used the example of its Exposure Reports, which consists of proactive monitoring sweeps that rely on Avatar technology, as well as the state-of-the-art 100 Children Report that assists the agency with providing the necessary children protection.