Romania

[RO] Draft Decision to Install Ad Duration Counter Rejected

IRIS 2013-6:1/29

Eugen Cojocariu

Radio Romania International

On 16 May 2013, the Consiliul Naţional al Audiovizualului (National Audiovisual Council - CNA) rejected by 8 votes to one the Draft Decision to oblige media service providers to install and display a counter for TV advertising.

The president of the CNA issued the proposal to install counters that are displayed simultaneously with the advertisement directly on the TV screen. The counter is supposed to enable viewers to control whether the media service providers comply with the quantitiatve advertising rules of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive 2010/13/EU and the national media law, specifically the maximum amounts of hourly advertisments. The counters were supposed to count down the hourly maximum along with the screening of the advertisement.

The President argued that the CNA receives 25 to 30 complaints weekly, most of them alleging breaches of the quantitive advertising rules. In turn, the members of the Council stated that the obligation to install and display ad duration counters would not only be an over-regulation of the field. It would also confuse the public and trigger the necessity to repeatedly explain what the counter on TV screens means. This would make the CNA’s activities unduely complicated.

Furthermore, the majority of the CNA’s members noted that breaches of the TV ad duration rules are scarce. The advertising duration on most TV stations rarely reaches 12 minutes per hour. Even the big commercial TV stations struggle to exploit the maximum duration due to the economic crisis.

According to the Audiovisual Law the commercial televisions are allowed to air 12 minutes of ads per hour. Public media service providers are allowed to have eight minutes of ads per hour. Self-promotion (for their own programmes and for auxiliary products directly derived from these programmes), social announcements, sponsoring announcements and product placement are not included in these duration limits.