Re: Surely Fire Sales Are Always Limited?
"We shouldn't be wasting our hard earned tax wonga on this nonsense."
We don't. The ASA is funded through a voluntary levy on advertising spend. The levy is paid by many advertisers and agencies, largely because the existence of the ASA prevents the government from imposing a regulator that would do more than ban adverts and publicly shame non compliant advertisers.
That said, the ASA is very good at acting on a single complaint and recently ruled that many of the claims on the Society of Homeopaths website were utter bobbins, a fact which was picked up and reported on by the mainstream media.
Non-compliance can also lead to no mainstream media outlet touching your ads so they are not quite as toothless as some may claim.