VietNamNet Bridge – The Ministry of Information and Communications will inspect television advertisements this month after receiving complaints of deceptive or overstated claims in TV ads.

Representative of the Ministry's department of broadcasting and electronic information management in the south, Dao Kim Phu, said customers and local media had reported that some products did not have the functions or characteristics claimed in advertisements.

HCM City-based TV shopping company "Happy Shopping" last month was fined VND450 million (US$22,000) for selling smuggled, fake and unlabelled products and trading cosmetics without a licence.

The HCM City Market Watch department raided the company in April and found more than 13,000 smuggled products including cosmetics, kitchen appliances, nearly 600 fake products and 10,700 foreign products that were not labelled in Vietnamese.

Late last month, another TV shopping company "Viet Home Shopping" was found to have products with the logo "as seen on TV", however the logo was registered for exclusive use by online shopping service provider "Best Buy".

However, Viet Home Shopping's sale manager Le Lan reportedly said the company imported products from China and had no idea about the logo on the products.

Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai, general director of Viet An Trade and Investment Joint Stock Company that owns Viet Home Shopping, told online newspaper Vnexpress.net that the logo on her company's products was not identical to the registered one and the products had not been advertised on television.

Ministry official Phu said yesterday that all television stations nationwide had been asked to review their advertisements, especially those about which customers complained.

Television stations were responsible for the content of advertisements they broadcast, so they needed to check the product quality first by sighting documents that proved the products' origin and quality, Phu said.

With cosmetics and health supplements, licences or quality certificates from medicine management and health departments were compulsory.

Phu said the department would make random inspections of television stations, especially pay-TV channels with a high ratio of TV shopping programmes.

At a conference on advertising law enforcement, held on Tuesday in HCM City, head of the Ministry of Information and Communications's Department of Broadcasting and Electronic Information Management Luu Vu Hai said common advertising violations related to overstating or false advertisements that made customers misunderstand the products or services.

He emphasised that the adverts were usually found in TV shopping programmes where the violations were ignored because of their huge revenue.

Last year, television advertising accounted for 79.7 per cent of the total VND14 trillion ($683 million) revenue from advertising across all media, figures from the department and TNS Media Viet Nam Co Ltd show.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News