Product Specific Advertising
Advertising for alcoholic beverages
Alcoholic drinks are not ordinary consumer goods. When inappropriately consumed, there is a potential for abusing alcoholic beverages which can lead a small proportion of the population and particularly vulnerable people to dependence and/or harmful conducts.
For these reasons, legislative measures have been ruling over the advertising of alcoholic beverages in Europe for the last 15 years. Many of these EU-wide restrictions are established by the “Television Without Frontiers” directive and many Member States took additional restrictive measures. In addition, the advertising industry policies itself thanks to agreed standards whose purposes are to eliminate inappropriate advertising and to initiate a range of socially responsible messages preventing any abuse of alcohol.
A satisfactory mix of regulation and self-regulation principles
An egta survey completed in 2000 showed that egta EU members apply 29 rules aimed at promoting responsible consumer behaviour and avoiding possible 'slip-ups' in advertised messages. From these 29 rules, it was possible to define a common core of 15 principles applied by all egta members.
- The domains covered by these principles include health, the protection of minors, sport and safety issues. Six of them specifically aim to protect minors against alcohol abuse.
- Among these measures, 60% are of legislative origins (either European or national) and 40% originate from self-regulatory initiatives, national codes of conduct or rules established by broadcasters themselves.
- Self-regulation offers many benefits to deal with the fast moving advertising industry. It is more responsive and flexible and it also enables cultural differences, for example between Northern and Southern European cultures, which is something no European-level regulation can possibly achieve.
Consumers' complaints related to advertising for alcoholic beverages are limited. The European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) figures show that, in 2002, the number of complaints received throughout Europe (that is, the EU, four applicant countries, Switzerland, Russia and Turkey) was 49.505. These complaints addressed all types of products and services across all media: outdoors, press, magazines, broadcast, direct mail, etc, with TV advertising accounting for 19%. If we break these figures down further, we see that complaints related specifically to alcohol represented 1% of the total complaints received in 2002.
Defining the appropriate level of hard law
Recently a study conducted by CARAT on the impact of legislative measures on the television advertising market (July 2005) highlighted that Member States in which advertising is covered through comprehensive self-regulation mechanisms have not recommended any changes in legislation, thus acknowledging that self-regulation proves effective. In addition, examples have hitherto failed to show any link between strict legislative restrictions to the advertising of alcoholic beverages and lower levels of consumption. In a way, these conclusions reinforce the finding of previous studies which stressed that there is no proportional relationship between the volume of alcohol advertising and the volume of alcohol consumed.
Defining appropriate levels of regulation will never be an easy task but in this policy debate, egta will keep promoting sound and well-tuned regulation which can achieve the stated public policy objective without imposing unnecessary or disproportionate regulatory burden.
Advertising for medicinal products
Pharmaceutical products cannot be treated alike regular consumer goods, notably because of their physiological effects and, in the case of prescription-only medicines, because of the need for medical supervision. For obvious health reasons, it is clear that specific limitations on commercial communications for medicines should be maintained.
The European directive of 31 March 1992 relating to “medicinal products for human use”, as revised in 2004, establishes that:
- the advertising for “Over The Counter / OTC” medicines is legal and must comply with a set of very specific criteria
- any form of advertising to the general public of medicines which are only available on medical prescription is prohibited
Whereas the EU legislation and the European Commission acknowledge that all single market principles must apply to OTC medicines and that these can be advertised, OTC medicines remain subjected to very different and restrictive rules across the Member States. With regards specifically to these products freely available to the public, egta believes that advertising restrictions existing at national level should be lifted since these are not justified by public health considerations and represent unnecessary breaches to single market principles.
With regards to prescription-only medicines, egta questions the need to maintain today's wide-ranging prohibition on commercial communications whereas patients are more and more eager to be informed about available treatments and to become informed actors of their own health. egta believes that new forms of communication rendered possible by technologies in the audiovisual sector, and particularly on-demand services, could offer possibilities to address this legitimate call from patients and thus positively contribute to maintaining high levels of public health across Europe.
Discussions on this issue and notably on how to differentiate prohibited direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) and branded information which could be allowed, must be pursued by health policy stakeholders. TV and radio sales houses are keen on contributing to this debate with practical examples of possibilities offered by new technologies and on developing a specific European code of conduct relating to on-screen information on medicines.
For more information, please refer to egta's position paper.
Advertising for tobacco products
The advertising or sponsorship of tobacco products is banned across the European Union by the “Television Without Frontiers” directive, as for television, and by the “advertising and sponsorship of tobacco products” directive, as for radio.
egta and its members fully respect this ban, which is not to be called into question in view of the scientifically-established harms of tobacco consumption.
Television broadcasters would nevertheless welcome a clarification of the legislation in the case of live retransmissions of international sports events taking place outside the European Union and which are themselves or whose participants are sponsored by tobacco manufacturers (e.g. a car of the Alger-Dakar rally-raid).