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Primetime advertising ban begins on French public TV
Date: 06/01/2009
French president Nicolas Sarkozy's dramatic changes to the country's television industry began last night as public service broadcasting (PSB) channels scrapped evening primetime advertising.
The move follows the French National Assembly's adoption (17th Dec 2008) of the broadcasting reform bill by 293 votes against 242. This bill aims to ban advertising on public TV channels, and establishes new taxes to compensate the resulting shortfall in income, such as a tax on commercial broadcasters' revenue.
With regards to the ban on advertising on public TV channels, the bill states that:
"From 5 January onward, programs broadcast between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. on public channels, [...] except during regional and local programs, will not include advertisements others than the ones for unbranded and generic products and services. This disposition will also apply to programs broadcast between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. once digital switchover takes place."
President Sarkozy studied the BBC model before declaring advertising would be gradually banned from France's five state channels by 2011, beginning with primetime.
Last night from 20:00, 20 million French primetime viewers watched PSB channels without the traditional 20-minute block of advertising between the end of the evening news at 20:30 and the start of evening entertainment programming at 20:50. Advertising on PSB channels will now stop at 20:00 and start again at 06:00 the following day.
So now prime time for the two public broadcasters starts at 20:35 (since 15 minutes of ads will be gone), while ratings leader TF1 continues to broadcast its top-rated news with commercials from 20:00 - 20:50. It remains to be seen whether viewers will stay with the longer news - ads and all - or switch over to public broadcasting 15 minutes before TF1's news ends.
President Sarkozy plans to make up the loss of funds by taxing commercial television advertising revenue and introducing a tax on internet and telephone providers, resulting in €450m (£400m) of funding for 2009.
In parallel, thirteen French daily newspapers have joined forces to offer a January ad deal, the equivalent of an 80% discount, in an attempt to get a slice of the adspend freed up by the new prime-time TV ad ban.
The print titles, under the banner "puissance PQN", are offering a page advertising in each of their titles to run within a period of eight consecutive days in January, with coinciding presence on their related websites, for just €200,000.
The titles involved include Le Monde, Le Figaro, Les Echos, L'Equipe, Libération, France Soir and International Herald Tribune. Combined they reach a total of 11.1m every day
Source: MediaGuardian, BrandWeek, WARC, Csquared, additional content by WFA.
WFA Comment: This topic has been covered by the WFA's Media Committee via news alerts and also at the last meeting in Dusseldorf. WFA will, with the help of the French National Advertiser Association, UDA, continue to monitor developments and keep our members informed (see .pdf update from UDA below - in French). For more information contact Robert Dreblow [email protected]
Documents:
Publicité télévision site UDA janvier 2009 _2_.pdf
