Global Policy Forum

By Jonas Astrup

In the context of a fast-changing media landscape for marketers and advertisers, the International Chamber of Commerce held a series of meetings in New York last week to address challenges to self-regulation. At the meetings, hosted by News Corporation and ICC's American affiliate, the United States Council for International Business (USCIB), industry representatives made substantial progress toward a consolidated worldwide code of practice for advertisers, slated for adoption by the ICC Executive Board in June.

The ICC meetings were chaired by Procter & Gamble Senior Vice President John Manfredi, who serves as chairman of the ICC Commission on Marketing and Advertising. They included a roundtable that looked at new challenges in self-regulation, including product placement, interactive marketing and marketing to children

Increasingly, products, services and commercial communications are linked into integrated marketing campaigns cutting across new and old media, often including television, radio, the Internet, video games, movies, events, sport and music. Business experts at the ICC meetings predicted this trend would grow even more prevalent.

"Paid product placement has existed for over 50 years, but has recently become more important as a potential medium in light of the fragmentation of media audiences," said Mike Longhurst, Senior Vice President of McCann Erickson, who said he was pleased that ICC would take the lead in extending self-regulation to these new areas.

The findings of the roundtable fed into later deliberations in an ICC working group charged with streamlining the global self-regulatory framework for advertising and marketing communication practice. The working group completed revisions to a consolidated ICC code of marketing and advertising for use by industry worldwide.

ICC has been a major rule-setter for international advertising since the 1930s, when the first ICC code on advertising practice was issued. Since then, it has extended the ICC self-regulatory framework on many occasions to assist companies in marketing their products responsibly. However, the proliferation of codes has resulted in a patchwork of rules, leading to appeals for consolidation.

"The new consolidated code will follow the well-established ICC tradition of promoting high ethical standards in advertising by means of relevant and well-implemented self-regulatory codes," said Oliver Gray, Director General of the European Advertising Standards Alliance and co-chair of the ICC Task Force on Code Revision, the working group tasked with the consolidation process.

The ICC codes are enforced at national level by so-called Self-Regulatory Organizations (SROs), many of which took part in the ICC meetings in New York. "One of the SROs present reported that last year it received more than 25,000 complaints in its country alone," said Mr Gray. "This illustrates that self-regulation works and has a tremendous impact on the marketing practices of companies around the world."