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New Advertising Code in Ireland wins industry Best Practice Award
On 21 April, the European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) Best Practice Award was presented to the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland (ASAI). The prestigious industry prize was presented to the ASAI for its comprehensive revision of the national self-regulatory code of advertising practice. The revision was conducted in 2006 and involved extensive consultation with industry, regulators, NGOs and the general public, in accordance with EASA Best Practice Recommendations.
Consultation with a broad spectrum of interested parties when drafting and revising national advertising codes is one of the key criteria of the EASA Best Practice Recommendation on Code Drafting, and forms part of the 10 commitments made by the advertising industry to the European Commission in signing the EASA Self-regulation Charter in 2004. EASA Director General Oliver Gray remarked that “interest in the Best Practice Award is growing year on year right across the EASA network and we can tell by the submissions that real progress is being made to implement the Charter”.
On receiving the award, ASAI Assistant Chief Executive Orla Twomey said “We appreciate the recognition of the review structure that we put in place for the development of the 6th Edition of the Code. While ASAI have always consulted with government and other bodies including NGOs, we feel that the process was enhanced by the public consultation and more extensive research carried out on this occasion. We are honoured to accept this award.”
The Spanish self-regulatory organisation (SRO) Autocontrol, won the silver award for their multi-media awareness campaign, and special jury mentions were given to Hungary (for outstanding achievement over the past year - an awareness campaign, an on-line complaints form, industry training and code consultation) and to Italy for a creative exhibition of jury decisions over the last 40 years.
The awards were judged by a panel of EASA industry members. “The standard of this year´s entries was exceptionally high”, said Bertrand Cazes of the European Group of Television Advertising (EGTA), a jury member. “The winning entries were exceptional and we were also highly impressed by the creativity and ingenuity of many of the entries made by SROs practicing self-regulation in new markets on limited budgets. All the initiatives submitted are highly commendable”.
The EASA AGM was hosted by the Hungarian SRO ÖRT, as part of a 2-day series of meetings bringing together representatives of EASA’s 45 members. As part of the event, EASA held an internal new media workshop in conjunction with the European Publishers Council, which focused on exploring the capacity of self-regulation to deal with new media formats and platforms. The workshop is the first in a series of events planned to further examine and find solutions to the
For further information on the ASAI please contact Orla Twomey at orla@asai.ie.
For more information about EASA and advertising self-regulation, please contact Katie Carroll at communications@easa-alliance.org.
Note to editors:
The Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland (ASAI) is the self-regulatory body set up by the advertising industry to promote the highest standards of commercial advertising and to enforce the Code of Standards for Advertising, Promotional and Direct Marketing, full details of which are available on ASAI’s website – www.asai.ie. ASAI is a founding member of the EASA.
The European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) is a non-profit organisation based in Brussels and is the single voice of advertising self-regulation in Europe. It acts as the European coordination point for advertising self-regulatory bodies and systems across Europe. EASA brings together 30 SROs (26 from 24 European countries as well as SROs in Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) and 15 organisations representing the advertising industry (advertisers, agencies and the media) in Europe.
The EASA Best-Practice award is presented each year to the self-regulatory organisation that has most effectively implemented an element of the EASA Best Practice Model – a set of operational standards for advertising standards bodies. The jury is composed of representatives from the advertising industry associations (advertisers, agencies and media) in membership of EASA. The annual award was previously won by Turkey in 2004, South Africa in 2005 and the Netherlands in 2006.
The EASA Self-Regulatory Charter was signed by the European advertising industry in 2004 at the Advertising Self-Regulation Summit. In signing the Charter, the industry made 10 key public commitments to improving self-regulation across the EU. A ‘Get-Fit’ programme was put in place to implement these commitments in self-regulatory systems at national level and EASA is currently conducting an extensive review of the results since 2004 which will be presented to the European Commission in mid-2007.