It is the ASA’s decision whether to make a referral to Trading Standards. “Importantly, for misleading or unfair advertising, the ASA can refer the matter to Trading Standards to take action under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. The following piece of text from the UK House of Common’s August 2020 briefing paper on Regulation of Advertising by the ASA makes this ruling significant and therefore important for Playrix to fix its ads for the UK market: That said, the UK government does take misleading advertising cases very seriously, and Playrix’s ruling falls into that category. In other words, a ruling by the ASA does not directly translate to Playrix abiding by it. Therefore, it cannot interpret or enforce legislation. It is not funded by the British government but by a levy on the advertising industry.
It is important to note, however, that the ASA is a self-regulatory and non-statutory organisation of the UK’s advertising industry. Therefore, the ads are misleading in the eyes of the ASA. The ASA understood that the Homescapes and Gardenscapes games in large part consisted of gameplay that did not represent the ad content and Facebook’s ad time limits were enough to showcase more representative gameplay.
Unfortunately for Playrix, all these arguments fell on deaf ears. They said that Facebook’s ad policies limit ad length, and it’s not possible for them to showcase all game content in a short period of time. They stated that the ad content was implemented in their games as “mini-games” that show up at various points of the game experience. The ads included the line “Not all images represent actual gameplay”. Playrix tried to justify its strategy by making three points:ġ. Well, on September 30th, the United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority published a ruling that bans Playrix from using such ads in the UK to acquire users for its games, because they were deemed to be misleading. To check out this week’s entire meta, visit Remember these ads from Homescapes or Gardenscapes? MTM and PG.biz have partnered on a weekly column to not only bring you industry moving news, but also short analyses on each. Master the Meta is a free newsletter focused on analysing the business strategy of the gaming industry.
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