Website advertising

www.worcester.gov.uk is visited by around 50,000 people who live or work in and around Worcester every month. This makes it a standout method for local and national organisations to promote themselves to the people of Worcester.

Allowing advertise on the website enables Worcester City Council to generate income from national and local advertisers which will be re-invested in improving council services.

Worcester City Council uses the Google AdSense to deliver advertising across its website.

Website advertising policy

As part of the its long-term goal of reducing costs, Worcester City Council has permitted the use of controlled advertising on its website www.worcester.gov.uk.

Google AdSense network is deployed for delivering advertising on the Worcester City Council website.

Please take a moment to read Google’s privacy policy.

General principles

The placement of advertisements within the site will be coordinated to make sure they do not compromise the prime purpose and functionality of the website.

The Council reserves the right to refuse to promote or to remove any individual advertisement which, in the opinion of the Council, is considered inappropriate.

All adverts must adhere to the codes of conduct laid down by the Advertising Standards Authority and must not conflict with the Council's aims and priorities. The Advertising Standards Authority's Code includes provisions that marketing communications:

• must be legal, decent, honest and truthful
• must not bring advertising into disrepute and, in addition, must not bring the Council into disrepute
• must conform to the Code
• must respect the principles of fair competition.

Advertising will also be subject to the Code of Practice on Local Government Publicity and the requirements of the Financial Services Authority.

The promotion of any advertisement on the Council's website should not be seen as an official endorsement or recommendation of that advertiser's products or services.

The Council is not responsible for the quality or reliability of the product or services offered within any advertisement. The Council would never knowingly run an advertisement that is misleading, offensive, untrue or fraudulent.

The Council does not accept responsibility for errors, omissions or for any consequences arising when visiting third party websites by following advertising link.

Most products and services may be promoted on the Council’s website; however, some specific categories and services are prohibited as defined below.

This list is not comprehensive and may be changed at any time.

An advertisement will not be accepted if it, in the reasonable opinion of the Council, it:

• is inappropriate or objectionable
• may result in the Council being subject to prosecution
• promotes gambling
• promotes payday loans
• refers to tobacco or similar products
• might be deemed inappropriate for children, for example, violent films, pornography and so on
• appears to influence support for a political party/candidate
• appears to conflict with the Council’s wider promotion of healthy and active lifestyles
• appears to promote racial or sexual discrimination, or discrimination on the basis of disability, faith, gender or age
• is the subject of a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority and upheld by such Authority as a legitimate complaint.

The above list is not exhaustive, and the Council retains the right to refuse advertising on the grounds that, in the Council’s opinion, it is inappropriate or it conflicts with services already provided by the organisation.

Disclaimer

Whilst every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the content of the advertisements contained in this publication, Worcester City Council cannot accept any liability for errors or omissions contained in any of the advertisements provided by an advertiser. Worcester City Council does not accept any liability for any information or claims made by the advertisement or by the advertisers. Any inclusion of Worcester City Council’s name on a publication should not be taken as an endorsement by Worcester City Council.

Feedback

Your feedback will help us to continually improve our services. If you wish to provide us with any feedback or comments about the advertising on the website, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Behavioural targeting, cookies and privacy

Cookies are small text files which identify your computer to our server. They are widely used on the internet to make websites work, or work more efficiently. We send these to your computer for the following reasons:

• to tailor the website to your browser
• to help us analyse the use of the website
• to allow applications on our website to work correctly - for example, making sure that we know when you have logged on or off and which part of an application you are accessing.

Google AdSense uses cookies to help serve the ads that it displays on the websites of its partners, such as websites displaying Google ads or participating in Google-certified ad networks. When users visit a Google partner's website, a cookie may be placed on that end-user's browser.

Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your previous visits to our website or other websites.

Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to our sites and/or other sites on the Internet.

We do not use cookies to store any personally identifiable information about you. We will not make any attempt to find out the identities of people visiting our website without their prior permission.

If we want to collect personally identifiable information through our website – for example when you request a service from us - we will tell you beforehand. We will make it clear when we collect this information and will explain what we intend to do with it.

Disabling advertisements and cookies

You can choose to prevent advertisements and their associated cookies from displaying or being stored on your device at anytime by clicking on the ‘Cookie’ link in the footer of this website and setting the ‘Advertising Cookies’ option to ‘off’.