Discourses of Advertising Self-Regulation

This project analyses the annual reports of the UK’s advertising regulator, the Advertising Standards Authority, in order to explore the rhetoric and arguments used to promote and defend its role in protecting consumers from manipulative, harmful, and misleading advertising. The advertising industry aims to convince stakeholders that it can effectively regulate itself, making government intervention unnecessary but this argument is increasingly challenged. The project adopts rhetorical analysis, a form of interpretive textual analysis, and computer-assisted textual analysis. It will contribute to current academic and policy debates about the effectiveness of self-regulation through peer-reviewed articles and a white paper.