Self-promotion.
Concept
The audiovisual communication that informs about the programming of the service provider, about specific programs or programming packages or about the accessory products derived directly from them.
Legal nature
Self-promotion is not considered commercial communication for the purposes of the General Law of Audiovisual Communication. However, for television audiovisual communication, the time spent on advertisements about their own programs and products may not exceed 5 minutes per hour of clock time and their contents will be subject to the obligations and prohibitions established generally for commercial advertising.
Audiovisual commercial communication.
Images or sounds intended to promote, directly or indirectly, the goods, services or image of a natural or legal person engaged in an economic activity. These images or sounds accompany a program or are included in it in exchange for a compensation in favor of the service provider.
In any case, they are forms of audiovisual commercial communication: television or radio advertising messages, sponsorship, teleshopping and product placement.
Advertising message.
Any form of message from a public or private company or a natural person in relation to its commercial, industrial, artisanal or professional activity, in order to promote the supply of goods or services, including real estate, rights and obligations.
Teleshopping.
Television audiovisual communication of direct offers to the public for the supply of goods or the provision of services, including real estate, rights and obligations.
Telepromotion.
Audiovisual commercial communication in which the presenter or any of the protagonists of the program, using the setting, atmosphere and prowess of the program, expose for a time clearly greater than the duration of an advertising message the characteristics of a good or service, so that the message cannot be issued independently of the corresponding program.
Sponsorship.
- Any contribution that a public or private company or a natural person not linked to the provision of audiovisual communication services or the production of audiovisual works makes to the financing of audiovisual communication services or programs, for the purpose of promoting their name, brand, image, activities or products.
- Audiovisual media service providers have the right to have their programs sponsored, except for current news content programs.
- The public must be clearly informed of the sponsorship at the beginning, at the beginning of each resumption after the breaks occur or at the end of the program through the name, logo, or any other symbol, product or service of the sponsor.
- Sponsorship cannot condition editorial independence. Nor may it directly encourage the purchase or leasing of goods or services, in particular through specific promotional references to them. In addition, sponsorship may not affect the content of the sponsored program or audiovisual communication or its broadcast schedule in such a way as to affect the responsibility of the provider of the audiovisual communication service.
Location of product.
- Any form of audiovisual commercial communication consisting of including, displaying or referring to a product, service or trademark in a way that appears in a program.
- Audiovisual media service providers have the right to broadcast feature films, short films, documentaries, films and television series, sports programmes and entertainment programmes on location. In the other programmes, product placement may only be carried out in exchange for the free supply of goods or services, as well as material aid for production or prizes, with a view to their inclusion in a programme.
- When the programme has been produced or commissioned by the service provider or one of its subsidiaries, the public must be clearly informed of the product’s location at the beginning and end of the programme, and when it resumes after an advertising break.
- The location cannot condition the editorial independence. Nor can it directly encourage the purchase or leasing of goods or services, carry out specific promotions of these or give undue prominence to the product.
- Product placement in children’s programming is prohibited.
Advertising interruptions.
- Commercial communication must be clearly differentiated from other audiovisual content.
- Television advertising and teleshopping should be easily identifiable as such and distinguished from editorial content.
- Television advertising messages must respect the integrity of the program in which they are inserted and of the units that make up it.
- The transmission of television films (excluding series, serials and documentaries), feature films and television news programmes may be interrupted once for each scheduled period of thirty minutes.
- Children's programs: Interruption is possible once for each scheduled uninterrupted period of thirty minutes, if the program lasts longer than thirty minutes.
- Broadcasts of sporting events on television may only be interrupted by isolated advertising messages when the event is at a standstill. In these retransmissions, whether or not they have autonomous parts, advertising messages can be inserted as long as they allow the development of the event to be followed.
- No television advertising or teleshopping will be inserted during religious services.
Qualitative limitations of audiovisual commercial communications.
Prohibition of illicit advertising.
According to the General Advertising Law, for example, misleading, unfair, aggressive advertising or advertising that infringes the provisions of the regulations governing the advertising of certain products, goods, activities or services (health products; which generate risks to the health or safety of people; games of luck, envy or chance), etc.
Advertising prohibited by its form.
- Covert commercial communication: direct or indirect verbal or visual presentation of the goods, services, name, brand or activities of a producer of goods or a service provider on television programmes, other than the location of the product, where such presentation is intentionally intended by the audiovisual media service provider to serve an advertising purpose and may mislead the public as to the nature of such presentation. This presentation will be considered intentional, in particular, if it is made in exchange for compensation in favour of the service provider.
- Subliminal advertising: By means of techniques for the production of stimuli of frontier intensities with the thresholds of the senses or similar, it can act on the target audience without being consciously perceived.
Advertising prohibited by its content.
- That which infringes human dignity or promotes discrimination based on sex, race or ethnic origin, nationality, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation.
- The one that uses the image of the woman with a humiliating or discriminatory character
- The one that promotes harmful behaviors for health.
- The commercial communication of cigarettes and other tobacco products, as well as of the companies that produce them.
- The commercial communication of medicines and health products that contravenes the provisions of article 78, paragraphs 1 and 5, of Law 29/2006, of 26 July, on guarantees and rational use of medicines and health products.
- Television commercial communication of alcoholic beverages with a higher level of twenty degrees.
- Commercial television communication of alcoholic beverages with a level below twenty degrees when it is broadcast outside the time slot between 20.30 hours and 6 hours of the following day, unless this advertising is an indivisible part of the acquisition of rights and the production of the signal to be broadcast.
- The commercial communication of alcoholic beverages with a level below twenty degrees when directed to minors, encourages immoderate consumption or associates consumption with the improvement of physical performance, social success or health.
- The one that promotes harmful behaviors for the environment.
- It encourages behaviors that are harmful to people’s safety.
- Commercial communication of a political nature, except in the cases provided by Organic Law 5/1985, of June 19, on the General Electoral Regime.
Quantitative limitations of audiovisual commercial communications.
- Limit of 12 minutes per hour of clock for the broadcast of advertising and teleshopping messages in television audiovisual communication services.
- Sponsorship, product placement and telepromotion are excluded from the 12-minute limit when the individual telepromotion message has a duration clearly longer than that of an advertising message and the set of telepromotions does not exceed 36 minutes per day, nor 3 minutes per hour of clock.