A message from our Chairman, Rt Hon Lord Smith of Finsbury, taken from our 2014 Annual Report:

In last year’s report, I set out our big overriding ambition: to make every UK ad a responsible ad. And throughout this past year, we have continued to work – day in, day out – to help to achieve that goal.

We’ll never get everything right, of course, but in a whole host of areas of advertising that raise public concerns, whether it’s about food, alcohol, payday loans, gambling, or plain simple misleading claims about availability or cost, we’ve taken action wherever we think it right to do so. I’m especially grateful to our dedicated staff who have continued to apply their expertise and professionalism in helping us to achieve this.

But we’ve also, this year, been putting some serious thought into how we go about working as effectively as possible, with the interests of the consumer in mind. It’s about how we provide the best value to the consumer through what we do.

That’s why we’ve put in place a new broad strategy for our work, which is all about having more impact and being more proactive. Instead of looking at every single case in as much detail as every other one, we want to put a stronger focus on those cases where there is the greatest potential detriment or harm. And we’ll look at those areas of advertising where a general problem emerges, so that we can take a view across a cluster of cases and tackle the underlying issues, rather than simply looking at a single instance. The recent work we’ve done on copycat public service ads might be a good example of where we could go in future. We’ll be working just as hard as ever, of course, but I hope even more effectively.

Download our 2014 Annual Report.


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