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Welcome to Children's Advertising Review Unit

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The Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) was founded in 1974 to promote responsible children's advertising as part of a strategic alliance with the major advertising trade associations through the National Advertising Review Council (comprising the AAAA, the AAF, the ANA and the CBBB). CARU is the children's arm of the advertising industry's self-regulation program and evaluates child-directed advertising and promotional material in all media to advance truthfulness, accuracy and consistency with its Self-Regulatory Guidelines for Children's Advertising and relevant laws.

CARU's basic activities are the review and evaluation of child-directed advertising in all media, and online privacy practices as they affect children. When these are found to be misleading, inaccurate, or inconsistent with CARU's Self-Regulatory Guidelines for Children's Advertising, CARU seeks change through the voluntary cooperation of advertisers.

As an extension of its initial mission, to help advertisers deal sensitively with the child audience in a responsible manner, in 1996 CARU added a section to its Guidelines that highlight issues, including children's privacy, that are unique to the Internet and online sites directed at children age 12 and under. These Guidelines served as the basis of the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA). CARU has established a Safe Harbor Program for our supporters to help them protect the privacy of children online, and meet the requirements of COPPA and our Guidelines.

CARU's Self-Regulatory Guidelines are deliberately subjective, going beyond the issues of truthfulness and accuracy to take into account the uniquely impressionable and vulnerable child audience.

CARU recognizes that the special nature and needs of a youthful audience require particular care and diligence on the part of advertisers. Consequently, CARU performs a high level of monitoring, including the scrutinizing of over ten thousand television commercials, and the review of advertisements in print, radio and online media.

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20 Years Young: The History and Maturing of COPPA in a Privacy-Conscious Age

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1998: A Concern for Children’s Privacy Was Born From the moment home computers had the capacity to connect to the Internet, children had the ability to use these technologies to access online websites and services. In the 1990s, concerns about children’s privacy and safety online arose amid fears of marketing practices around selling children’s personal information and exposing children’s information to predators. The Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU), founded in 1974, has always been on the forefront of safeguarding children’s privacy. CARU is the self-regulatory arm of the children’s advertising industry, tasked with promoting truth in children’s advertising by reviewing and evaluating child-directed ads in all media to ensure they are truthful, accurate and appropriate. CARU also monitors online privacy practices as they affect children. Before there was any legislation on the matter, CARU monitored a burgeoning Internet and observed how children’s privacy and sa...
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