ASA CEO Guy Parker On The Challenges Of Going Native

“Native done well is a really good thing,” says the chief executive of the Advertising Standards Authority. But it needs to be clearly labelled and disclosed as advertising.

“Native advertising done well, and properly and clearly labelled, is a wonderful thing, so it really matters that advertisers get it right. And there’s pressure not to.”

That’s the view of Guy Parker, chief executive of the Advertising Standards Authority, the U.K.’s independent regulator of advertising for all media. The ASA has been regulating the content of U.K. advertising since 1962, and in 2011 took responsibility for regulating advertising claims on companies’ own websites and social media spaces. It investigates complaints about advertising, but it also works with advertisers to help them comply with the advertising codes.

The latest challenge for the ASA is native advertising and the questions it raises about whether readers know when what they’re looking at is an ad and when it’s editorial. So the first thing I asked Parker was whether native presented a particular set of regulatory problems.

Parker: For us, content is native advertising for the purposes of the Advertising Codes if the brand has both paid the publisher and controls the message in the content. It’s the same test that we have long applied to advertorials.

Native done well is a really good thing, because it’s more engaging than a normal ad would be. It’s not just the fact that the content reflects the look and format of the publisher’s editorial; there’s also quite often more permission given to the brand—and the publisher doing the native—to be a bit more engaging and a little less direct in the sell, and that can make the content more attractive to readers.

So we have no problem with native advertising per se, but it’s essential that it’s obvious when something is native. That normally means it has to be clearly labelled, otherwise people might just think it’s the publisher’s normal editorial content.

There are increasing concerns about native advertising not being clearly enough disclosed. My worry is that brands, and publishers in particular, jump out of the ad-blocking frying pan and into the not-clearly-disclosed-native fire, undermining consumer trust in what they’re doing.

The fact that ad blocking is on the rise, and that publishers are looking for new sources of revenue, has the potential to continue to encourage a rush to native advertising. That needn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but given there’s a correlation between more native, and more native that’s not clearly disclosed as advertising, you can see the potential to undermine the trust of the reader, who becomes less and less sure whether what they’re reading is genuine editorial or advertising.

CMO.com: Where does that leave you?

Parker: It’s about getting the message out that it really matters that advertisers and publishers get it right. And there’s pressure not to. There’s pressure from some quarters to obfuscate a little bit and make it a little bit unclear. That’s not a good thing.

I don’t like it when I hear commentators in this area say: “The problem with the ASA being strict on the labelling of native is that it might lead advertisers to not want to do native so much.” Well, why wouldn’t they? If they’re sincere about wanting to be responsible, why would that make any difference? It isn’t the fact that the status of the content is unclear that’s supposed to make native attractive. It’s the fact that it’s engaging and entertaining, and that doing native gets a bit more journalism into your advertising.

We’ve published two rulings on native since the beginning of the year: Telegraph/Michelin and Dylon/BuzzFeed. We found problems with them both. The Telegraph/Michelin one was reasonably straightforward. It was a piece of content that had the guy that used to be The Stig rushing around a racetrack in cars featuring Michelin tires. It was very journalistic. It was an interesting, engaging piece. They had got references to sponsored content and “in association with Michelin,” but we didn’t think it was clear enough that what they meant by those disclaimers was that this was a piece of advertising.

Don’t forget the context here is online publishers who do sometimes feature sponsored content, where the journalists still control the message, not the brands. You’ve got this middle category of sponsored content. We thought the Telegraph case was clearly saying that there was some sort of payment by Michelin, some sponsoring of this content, but it didn’t go far enough in making clear that Michelin were controlling the message.

The Dylon/BuzzFeed ruling was similar. It was a list of 10 or 15 laundry fails. It was very BuzzFeed-y in terms of the engaging and amusing nature of the content. Again, we didn’t think it was clear enough that this was effectively advertising. This ruling, in particular, generated responses from some along the lines of “Blimey, the ASA is being a bit strict on this,” but I think it’s really important that we’re very clear that advertisers and publishers have got to be unambiguous in making sure that the content complies with the rule of being “obviously identifiable as advertising.” Readers shouldn’t have to play the detective.

CMO.com: Something I’ve been interested in for a long time is, when you see these different terms—sponsored by, and in association, with and so on—what do people actually understand them to mean?

Parker: And everyone’s using different terms. Brought to you by is quite popular. In association with. Sponsored by. Sponsored content. So you’ve got a whole variety of different terms, but you’ve also got different contexts.

Some people yearn for simplicity. They just want yes or no, but we’ve got to judge advertising based on the codes, and we’ve got to make sure that the judgments that we make comply with the maximum harmonisation of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, which says that for most advertising to be banned, it’s got to mislead or be likely to mislead. Obviously, we can’t be more lenient than the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive in the decisions we make. But nor can we be stricter. We’ve got to regulate at exactly that level, that’s what maximum harmonisation means.

So as much as we might sometimes like to say: “You’ve got to say ‘Advertising’ or ‘Advertisement feature’ at the top,” it would be wrong for us to do that, because there may be other ways of displaying or labelling native content that do not confuse people; that do meet the “obviously identifiable as advertising” test. We’ve got to accept that we’ve got to live with a bit of complexity here, and there aren’t simple black-and-white answers to some of these questions.

CMO.com: Presumably, as you start to make rulings, and publicise them, those lines become clearer?

Parker: They do. This is very much a journey, and we’ve got further to go in communicating the do’s and don’ts of making clear when advertising is advertising. The same sort of things are happening elsewhere in Europe and in the U.S, and the fact that there’s chatter from abroad helps, because it raises awareness of this as an issue.

One of the challenges is that, whilst we’re getting the message out there, technology means that we’re presented with new scenarios, new platforms, new ways of doing things. The context is constantly shifting. We’re constantly being asked new questions about, “Yeah, but that was for that, this is different because…” or “The users of our app know this because they’re clued up and they’re very digital savvy, and they know that this is all native.” We’re constantly having to consider those arguments and take them into account in our decisions.