Marking three years since the ‘strong appeal to children’ guidance was brought into force, the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) and the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (BCAP) have announced some key updates to this guidance (Guidance).

The Guidance is presented as providing further clarification, yet it may in fact leave operators asking the same questions. However, it is essential the new Guidance is reviewed to ensure compliance, which is a licence requirement for all operators under LLCP SR 5.1.6/7.

Key changes

Clarification on social media:

Since the inception of the new ‘strong appeal’ rules, we have seen a raft of ASA rulings involving various sports and TV personalities, including Stuart Broad, Emma Willis, Adebayo Akinfenwa and Gary Neville. All these rulings looked closely at the number of social media followers the individuals had, in order to assess whether they may have had ‘strong appeal’ to children.  The Guidance has now taken this opportunity to codify what the rulings have shown us. The Guidance expresses that more than 100,000 under-18 followers across your social media platforms ‘is indicative of strong appeal’.

However, this figure is strongly caveated, as the Guidance goes on to note that a follower count falling on either side of the 100,000 figure is no guarantee of being of ‘strong appeal’ or not. Furthermore, to add ambiguity to the standard, the Guidance notes that ‘the actual number of under-18 followers for a given personality is likely to be significantly more than the social media accounts registered to under-18s which follow them’ given the high incidence of under-18s falsely declaring their age. Operators should remember this when assessing social media following close to the 100,000 follower mark – the ‘real’ number of under-18 followers is likely to be much more.

Following what we have seen from the rulings in this area, the Guidance confirms that operators should consider the data pertaining to the specific social media platform on which an ad appears, but there must also be a holistic view of an operator’s following on all their major social media platforms. Again, these are not defined to allow space for emerging platforms, but one can assume this includes at least Facebook, Bluesky, Instagram, Snapchat, X, TikTok, and YouTube. We would urge operators to be careful if any of the platforms more popular with the under-18s indicate that a personality is popular with that age category, even if they are not using that platform to distribute their advertising.

Finally, operators should be aware of the viral nature of social media and be willing to pull an ad if the ad or the personality involved acquires a status that increases the likelihood of having ‘strong appeal’ to children.

Adult-centric sports

The Guidance previously categorised whether various sports would be viewed as either high, moderate or low risk in terms of their ‘strong appeal’ to children. For example, tennis, cricket and rugby were previously classed as high risk, while horse racing, boxing, snooker and darts were considered low risk. This classification has now been removed in favour of a broader adult-centric definition. The only sports that remain explicitly mentioned in the Guidance (being particularly high risk) are football and eSports.

Adult-centric ‘refers to sports in which there is no evidence of significant participation or viewership amongst under 18s’. Therefore, this places a greater onus on operators to confidently hold data that a sport or a personality involved in that sport will not have a significant under-18 following. Again, this update does little to add clarity, and gives the ASA broader scope to find ads as having ‘strong appeal’ to children.

Conclusion

The Guidance contains notable changes that all operators should be reviewing and implementing. Namely, when using personalities and featuring particular sports and activities in your ads, the onus is firmly on you to ensure you have the social media and participation data to evidence there is no risk of your ad being of ‘strong appeal’ to children. Given the ASA’s continued enforcement action in this area and the licence breach an upheld ruling would cause, it is imperative operators implement this new Guidance and take note that ‘where there is reasonable doubt …an ad has strong appeal to children, stakeholders are reminded of the significant impact the rule has had in preventing gambling ads that have obvious strong appeal to children from coming to market in the first place’.