Since 2021, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has been scaling up its Active Ad Monitoring system, which captures ads by relevant advertisers from a range of social media platforms, and applies machine learning algorithms to identify and flag likely non-compliant ads, which are then sent to experts to review and act on.
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Consumer health has been one of these key problem areas for the system – which now processes more than two million ads a month – particularly food supplements that make unauthorized medical or health claims.
“Earlier this year, for the first time, we started to do very broad searches of ads that make medical or health related claims,” the ASA’s head of data science, Adam Davison, explained in an recently-published HBW Insight interview (see side bar).
“And this raised a selection of issues that weren't necessarily prevalent in the complaints we received from the public, but when we looked at them, we thought they were significant areas that needed more attention.”
As the following infographic shows, this has resulted in a number of rulings in the last two months against ads for supplements claiming to treat anxiety and stress, menopause, autism/ADHD and weight loss.
