ASA making advertisers pay through the nose - guilty or not

Something that is rife in this country at present is the habit cheating motorists have of simply putting a false number plate on their cars to avoid the speed cameras. If that number happens to be yours then you will not only get all the speeding fines but you will have to prove in a complex and time-consuming way to the prosecutor of the traffic court that you are the innocent party. If you ignore the fines and subsequent summons because you are the victim, you will not be able to get a new annual licence for your car until you have paid the fines generated by that idiot using your number plate. He inevitably gets away with it.

Games people play

The ASA does much the same thing. Some old fuddy-duddy with nothing to do decides that a nice game to play is to choose an advertisement that offends his sensitivities and then writes to the ASA to complain. OK, in recent times the ASA has thrown a lot of these out but every now and then because the complaint has some merit, they start the process of adjudication by telling the advertiser to withdraw the ad. If the advertiser is found not guilty there is no compensation. Losses in terms of legal fees, time wasted defending the complaint and a huge amount of money and opportunity wasted because the ad had been withdrawn, simply have to be written off. The complainant gets off scot free. Just like the guy who is using your number plate.

And there are a lot of people in this country who see the ASA as presenting them with a god-given opportunity to make their lone voice heard. Unlike when they complain about anything else such as lack of service delivery, mad taxi drivers and TV shows that offend them. In those cases they have to work quite hard to get some action. But with the ASA it's a lot easier.

In fact, at one stage, 75 per cent of all complaints to the ASA about cell phone industry advertisements were lodged by one person.

Maybe the ASA won't uphold all of the more pathetic complaints but they do respond to every single complaint.

Pay up or else

All of which costs money and that money has to come from somewhere. In the past month or so the ASA has jacked up their fees. It now cost an advertiser R9000 just to lodge a complaint against another advertiser. If things get as far as a final appeal that advertiser will NOW have to cough up R42 000.

Consumers and public bodies are exempt.

It is absolutely beyond me how the advertising industry puts up with this. Because if you talk to anyone in the ad agencies or any brand manager or marketing director, you will always hear the same bleat: that the ASA is an organisation run by protectionists and lawyers. That the ASA shoots first and asks questions afterwards. That the ASA will act on just one single complaint and care not a jot what the remaining 48 million South Africans think.

And most of all that the ASA with its skewed procedures can cost a company a fortune by making it withdraw advertising campaigns until it has proved itself innocent.

I doubt whether these latest price hikes will garner any sort of action from the advertising industry. They're an apathetic lot. And this is probably the main reason why the ASA gets away with running roughshod over them and behaving with all the arrogance of a traffic department.