FreshNetworks Blog

An article in this morning’s FT reported that the UK government intends to ban product placement, and suggests that digital media would need to be considered on the same level as traditional broadcast media.

Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary,  responding to the new EU directive that requires member states to declare publicly if they will permit product placement, said:

“There is a risk that product placement exacerbates this decline in trust and contaminates our programmes,” he said. “There is a risk that, at the very moment when television needs to do all it can to show it can be trusted, we elide the distinction between programmes and adverts.”

But perhaps of greater concern to those of us working in the digital industry was Burnham’s suggestion that the government should ensure that the same standards they expect from broadcast media are also upheld by digital media.

“If a clip on YouTube gets a million hits, it is akin to broadcasting and it doesn’t seem to me to be too difficult to have an alert on that clip, an alert for language, or violence or sex,”

The problem with this comparison is that broadcast media and digital media are simply not the same. Burnham was clear that advertising should come between editorial content on TV – so it’s okay to advertise before or at an interval of a programme, but not during it. But online these firm distinctions are not clear. In the world of social medi, video and photo merge with content and adverts. The medium is much more dynamic than TV broadcasting, and a more dynamic approach would be needed by the government if it were to intervene here. A simple ‘complain’ button would not suffice.

I suspect that this debate is only just beginning.