The CAP Code is the UK’s rulebook for non-broadcast advertising and marketing. Its full name is the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising and Direct & Promotional Marketing; the Committee of Advertising Practice writes it and the Advertising Standards Authority enforces it.
How the CAP Code works
The Code rests on one short principle: marketing should be legal, decent, honest and truthful, and prepared with a sense of responsibility to consumers and to society. The detail sits in numbered sections. Some apply to every ad, such as the rules on misleading advertising, harm and offence, and privacy. Others apply to particular products or audiences, such as health claims, food, alcohol, gambling, financial products, environmental claims and marketing to children.
It covers almost every kind of marketing a UK business produces outside TV and radio: paid search and social ads, display, email, SMS, direct mail, sales promotions, influencer posts and the marketing claims on the business’s own website and social accounts. Broadcast ads follow the separate BCAP Code, which is similar in substance. Press releases, editorial content and natural search listings sit outside the CAP Code.
The Advertising Standards Authority judges complaints against the Code and publishes its rulings. Those rulings, together with CAP’s own advice notes, show how each rule is read in practice, so they matter as much as the wording of the Code.
Why it matters
A handful of rules come up again and again in everyday digital marketing:
- Evidence before publication. Any objective claim, from fastest to trusted by thousands, needs documentary substantiation that you hold before the ad runs.
- Obvious identification. Marketing must be recognisable as marketing. Paid influencer content needs clear ad labelling, such as #ad at the start of the post.
- Prices. Prices aimed at consumers should include VAT and any fees that cannot be avoided, which is why VAT-inclusive pricing matters on consumer sites.
- Free offers and comparisons. Free must mean free apart from unavoidable costs such as postage, and comparisons with competitors must be fair and verifiable.
- Testimonials. A testimonial must be genuine and held on file, and it cannot be used to make a claim you could not make yourself.
For a small business these rules are where most complaints land. A beauty clinic in Birmingham promising permanent, pain-free results on a landing page has a problem the moment an ad points traffic to that page.
Common mistakes
- Thinking the Code applies only to paid ads. Claims on your own service pages are covered too.
- Using best, leading or number one without objective, current evidence.
- Showing ex-VAT prices to consumers, or adding a booking or admin fee at checkout that the headline price left out.
- Quoting reviews selectively, or editing them so they say more than the customer did.
- Assuming that because a platform approved the ad, it meets the Code. Platform approval is a separate check.
How to act on it
Read the general sections of the Code once, then the sector section that applies to you. Search ASA rulings for your sector to see where other businesses went wrong. Keep a simple claims file: each claim you use, the evidence behind it and the date that evidence was last checked.
Build the check into your process rather than relying on memory. Every new ad, landing page or promotion should be read against the Code before launch, and anything novel can go to CAP’s free advice service. I check headline claims, prices and offers against the Code whenever I build landing pages for ad campaigns, because that is where a claim usually becomes specific enough to be challenged.