Last week, the FCC commenced its long anticipated proceeding to reexamine its sponsorship identification rules. This proceeding has been rumored for over six months, having appeared on an agenda for a Commission open meeting in December, only to be pulled from the agenda days before it was to have been voted on. The Commission has initiated this proceeding, to a great degree, at the urging of Commissioner Adelstein who has been vocal in his concerns that the broadcast and advertising industries, in adopting advertising techniques to respond to technological and marketplace changes, has been exposing the public to commercial messages without their knowledge.  One of the principal practices of concern to the Commission, though not the only one, is embedded advertising (as the Commission refers to product placement and product integration into the dialog and/or plot of a program). While many of the trade press reports have focused on embedded advertising, this proceeding is wide-ranging and important to the broadcast, cable and advertising industries. Comments on the proceeding will be due 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register, with replies 30 days later.   We have prepared an Advisory, summarizing the issues raised by the Commission in this proceeding, which can be found here.

According to trade press reports, this proceeding was initially planned as a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which would have proposed rules which, after public comment, could have been immediately adopted. After significant lobbying from the advertising community, the Notice was released in two parts. First, there is a Notice of Inquiry (NOI), asking a series of questions about the current state of advertising on broadcast and cable outlets, and asking how the Commission should amend its rules to deal with new advertising techniques. Second, the Commission’s announcement contains an NPRM with respect to certain specific items, including proposing to clarify the type of sponsorship identification necessary in television advertising, the extension of the sponsorship identification rules beyond local origination cablecasting to cable network programming, and clarification of the rules with respect to live-read radio commercials. The specifics of the NOI and the NPRM are set forth in our AdvisoryContinue Reading FCC Begins Investigation of Embedded Advertising and Sponsorship Identification