ASA warns Camelot over advertisement

The authority has criticised the National Lottery operator for placing advertisements outside a school.

UK.- The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has responded to a complaint that questioned Camelot’s advertisement, as it was located outside the entrance of a school. The complainant challenged whether the ad that showed an image of a rainbow scratch card was directed at children under 16 years of age.

Camelot’s policy establishes that ads should not be placed within 100 meters of a school. The ad was placed using a database which was supposed to identify and remove schools from potential locations using postcode data. The National Lottery operator confirmed that the postcode database failed to identify the school.

Camelot took action to address this by removing the ad and implementing a different database tool which looked at the geographical boundaries of schools, rather than postcode data, to ensure that ads were not placed within 100 metres of a school.

“ASA was concerned by the proximity of the poster to the school and considered that the audience of the ad would likely be significantly skewed towards under-16s and because of that, it was directed at children through the context in which the ad appeared. We therefore considered that the placement of the ad breached the Code,” said ASA.