VietNamNet Bridge – False claims made by advertisements, directly or implicitly, are misleading and cheating customers and have become a matter of public concern, officials say.

Television ads have been at the forefront of this development for several years now, a Sai Gon Giai Phong (Liberated Saigon) newspaper report yesterday, May 10, cited several officials as saying.

Ngo Huy Toan, who heads a division that inspects press and publishing offices under the Ministry of Information and Communication, said: "There are several wrong advertisements on television that make the audience misunderstand products or services."

He cited as examples "inaccurate advertisements" that present titanium health bracelets and Chinese clinics as offering cures for all diseases.

Several ads can easily make the audience mistake food supplements for medicines, he added.

Weak laws

Apart from lax implementation of an old law that is not very clear, television channels are also taking advantage of loopholes to increase ad time, Toan said.

For instance, he said the law allows TV stations to pause a film screening twice to show ads, but they actually get shown four times – before, during and after the programme.

Similarly, the law allows for a maximum of three ad insertions during an entertainment programme, but this becomes five when they are shown before and after.

Toan said the advertising law should have clear and specific regulations on ad content about products and services to protect the viewers' rights.

Recently, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has drafted a new Advertising Law to regulate the form, content and means of advertising that will include a list of products and services that cannot be promoted through ads on public media as well as penalties for violations.

However, the draft still does not address shortcomings in the old law, especially those related to television advertising, which is booming alongside the mushrooming of TV channels.

The draft mentions that ad time on television channels should "not exceed seven per cent of the broadcasting time in a day".

While most channels, which function 24/24 are not apparently using up all this time, viewers are still frustrated because they are bombarded with advertisements during peak hours of 6pm-9pm.

The draft also forbids the use of superlative adjectives or nouns including most, only, best, number one and so on, but advertisements can easily imply what the words mean while not using them.

The draft also regulates that TV channels cannot have an ad break in programmes that are less than 15 minutes long.

However, this is easily circumvented by playing the ads at the beginning and end of programmes that are only 5 – 10 minutes long.

"The regulation does not correspond to the general television trend," said Nguyen Thanh Luong, deputy general director of Viet Nam Television, said adding that TV programmes these days are split up into smaller parts for the audience to follow easily.

"VTV is drafting a petition to ask the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to delete the regulation (pertaining to 15-minute programmes)," Luong said.

The law should ensure that the "content of an advertisement tells the truth about the product because its purpose is to sell it", he added.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News