The National Lottery operator Camelot has been reprimanded by the advertising watchdog after a poster was placed outside a school.
In a ruling published yesterday, the Advertising Standards Authority said that the poster ad for a scratchcard that appeared outside a school was directed at children under 16 was a breach of its code and must not appear close to a school again.
Its ruling said: “The ASA was concerned by the proximity of the poster to the school and considered that the audience of the ad would likely be significantly skewed towards under-16s and because of that it was directed at children through the context in which the ad appeared. We therefore considered that the placement of the ad breached the Code."
Camelot told the ASA that a database to identify schools had failed and that its policy is that ads are not placed within 100 metres of a school. It now use a different tool.
In a statement Camelot said: "We take our responsibilities in this area very seriously, as our policy is that no National Lottery advertisement should be placed within 100 metres of a school. This particular ad was placed using a database which is supposed to identify and remove schools from potential locations using postcode data.
"Unfortunately, on this rare occasion, the postcode database failed to identify the school. We took swift action to remove the ad, and we now use a different database tool - which looks at the geographical boundaries of schools - to prevent this from happening again."
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