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The marketing claims a Singapore business should not make, and what a pre clearance review costs here

Four claim types to take off your pages, the published Singapore price for having one checked, and what the regulator says about AI generated advertising.

Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 22 October 2026

The decision this page helps you make is whether to buy a pre clearance review on a piece of advertising, and what to change if you would rather not. The short version is that four claim types account for most of the trouble, the review has a published price in Singapore dollars, and the regulator has just put AI generated advertising on its own agenda. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and a specific question about your own campaign belongs with a Singapore lawyer.

The published price of having a claim checked

The Advertising Standards Authority of Singapore publishes what it charges to review ad copy before it runs. Read on asas.org.sg on 22 October 2026, the fees are a normal service inside 20 working days at S$600 for a member of AAMS, AMOS or DMAS and S$1,200 for a non member, and an express service inside 10 working days at S$700 for a member and S$1,400 for a non member. With GST those are S$654, S$1,308, S$763 and S$1,526. ASAS reviews the advertisement only once payment is received, and the turnaround runs from the day of payment rather than the day of submission.

ASAS also says of itself that it is not intended to be a clearing house for the approval of all advertising. So the honest use of that fee is the one high risk piece, not a standing monthly line. AAMS is the Association of Advertising and Marketing Singapore, AMOS the Association of Media Owners of Singapore and DMAS the Data-Driven Marketing Association of Singapore, and the member and non member gap on an express review is S$763 on a single submission.

What the Code is actually built on

ASAS is an advisory council to the Consumers Association of Singapore and it administers the Singapore Code of Advertising Practice. Read from the authority's own page on 22 October 2026, the Code seeks to promote a high standard of ethics in advertising through industry self regulation, it was formulated against the background of national law, international law and practice including the Advertising and Marketing Communications Code published by the International Chamber of Commerce, and its basic premise is that all advertisements should be legal, decent, honest and truthful.

Four words, quoted exactly. Most claim problems fail against the last two of them before anybody reaches for a specific rule.

The four claim types to take off your pages first

  • A ranking or placement promise. Google's own guidance is unambiguous and worth quoting back at any supplier who offers you one. In Google's words, no one can guarantee a number one ranking on Google. A supplier promising that position is making a claim about a system it does not control.
  • A result stated as a certainty. A specific outcome presented as what will happen rather than what has happened. Rewrite it as a dated case with the window stated, which is both honest and more persuasive.
  • A superlative with no measurable basis. Best, leading, number one, most trusted. If there is no criterion and no count behind it, it is taste wearing a statistic's clothes. Replace it with the criterion and the count.
  • A saving or comparison with no stated basis. Up to figures, was and now prices, and comparisons against an unnamed competitor. Name the basis on the same page as the claim, not behind a link.

The newest item on the regulator's own agenda

ASAS published a media release on 23 March 2026 reporting that it received 379 pieces of advertisement feedback in 2025, of which seven concerned advertisements involving generative artificial intelligence. In its own words that was more than double the number received in 2023 and 2024 combined, which was three. ASAS is calling on industry bodies to develop guidelines on the use of AI in advertisements, and it states the purpose directly: not to restrict the practice but to ensure that the resulting advertisements do not mislead consumers.

For a buyer that converts into one contract line. Ask your agency how AI generated images, voices or copy in your advertising will be labelled, and get the answer before the campaign rather than after a complaint. Seven cases in a year is a small number and the trend is the point.

For scale, what the complaint volume looks like

YearPieces of feedback ASAS reported receivingNoted in the release
2021304Food and beverage and electrical and electronics were the top categories
2024432About 40 per cent up on 2023. Telco advertisements most complained about, with 53 pieces
2025379Seven concerned generative AI advertising

Those are the authority's own published figures, read from its media release pages on 22 October 2026. A few hundred pieces of feedback a year across an entire market is not a hostile enforcement environment. It is a reputational one, and the cost of a complaint is usually the correction and the attention rather than a penalty.

Questions about advertising claims in Singapore

Do I have to get advertising pre approved

No. ASAS states that it is not intended to be a clearing house for the approval of all advertising. The review is a service you buy when a specific piece carries real risk.

Is the Code law

The Code is industry self regulation administered by an advisory council to the Consumers Association of Singapore, and it was formulated against the background of national law. Statutory obligations sit separately, and where your question is a statutory one it belongs with a Singapore lawyer rather than with a marketing page.

What about claims in an email or an SMS

Then a second layer applies, because contacting Singapore numbers brings in the Do Not Call provisions of the Personal Data Protection Act 2012. Sections 43 to 48 of that Act commenced on 2 January 2014, and section 43 is headed Duty to check register. That tells a buyer where the obligation sits without needing to interpret it.

Who is responsible if my agency wrote the claim

Settle it in the contract rather than in an argument. The practical position for a business is that the advertising carries your name, so a named reviewer on your side is cheaper than a dispute.

How do I check what a claim should say instead

Replace the adjective with the measurement. A figure, the sample it came from, and the date you took it. Our page on what a recommendation page has to disclose, quoted from a regulator's own advice works through the same discipline for a different market and the drafting lessons carry across.

The claim worth making instead

Every item above is a claim to remove. The replacement is the same sentence with a number, a sample size and a date in it, and that construction does something a superlative cannot: it survives being checked. Our own Singapore reading is an example of how unglamorous that looks. Across 64 blind readings taken for this market on 22 October 2026, with Singapore written into the text of every question because the search interface we use accepts a country, a language and a location parameter and ignores all three, two assistants named our business zero times and cited our domain zero times. We publish it because a company selling measurement that reports only its wins is making exactly the kind of claim this page is about. AI Knows Us watches a fixed list of buyer questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, and the figure it hands a Singapore business first is the one that can be defended.

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