ANA Urges FCC to Reject Onerous New Rules for Product Placement
ANA Urges FCC to Reject Onerous New Rules for Product Placement
November 24, 2008
ANA and other
industry groups have urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reject
proposals for onerous new time restrictions or disclosure rules on product
placement in television programming. We believe that the current disclosure
rules of the FCC are fully adequate to inform the public about various forms of
sponsorship practices.
Earlier this year,
the FCC published a Notice of Inquiry and Notice of Proposed Rulemaking
(NOI/NPRM) on product placement. The Commission sought comment on a proposed
rule change that would require disclosures to have lettering of a specific size
and to air for a particular amount of time during a program. In September, ANA
and a large, diverse group of media and marketing companies and associations
filed comments urging the
Commission to reject any new disclosure rules as unnecessary and overly
restrictive.
The FCC received
comments from a broad range of groups and individuals. Three groups that are
strongly critical of product placement filed comments urging the Commission to
go even further than the NOI/NPRM:
- The Campaign for a
Commercial-Free Childhood advocated treating product placement as the equivalent
of broadcast indecency and would prohibit all product placement before 10PM to
reduce the risk that children might see them;
- Commercial Alert
endorsed the "indecency" time-channeling approach and called for contemporaneous
disclosures;
- The Marin Institute
proposed similar time restrictions to protect minors because of the possibility
of product placements involving alcohol beverages.
ANA and other
industry groups felt it was critical to respond to these proposals, so we filed
reply comments last
Friday. Both sets of comments were drafted by Robert Corn-Revere, a media/First
Amendment expert and partner at the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP. ANA
was a leader in building the coalition of groups that came together to protect
product placement on television programming.
The extreme
proposals from these three groups would regulate product placement as if the
television audience is made up entirely of children. Our comments argue that
the FCC has no statutory authority to impose time-restrictions on product
placement. Also, we noted that any effort by the Commission to regulate TV
programming content by imposing time-channeling rules would raise very serious
First Amendment concerns.
There has been no showing of how the public is "harmed" in any way by product placement. The FCC's proposal appears to be a solution in search of a problem. We believe these proposals are clearly unnecessary and because they are overly restrictive, would violate the First Amendment. We urged the FCC to terminate this proceeding and simply clarify how existing FCC rules and policies apply to product placement.
If you have any questions, please contact Dan Jaffe in ANA's Washington office at 202-296-2359 or at djaffe@ana.net.
