Media Study - Medija centar Beograd

Advertising, sponsoring and product placement rules
Serbia has one comprehensive law on advertising, while in Germany the advertising legislation specific to
broadcasters or to print media are found in legislation concerning those specific sectors. Policy changes concerning
advertisement legislation are not required. The comparison of provisions regarding the conditions for advertising
for public broadcasters on the one side and for private broadcasters on the other side has revealed no fundamental
differences between the main legal systems reviewed in Serbia when compared with EU-Member States. In
principle, private broadcasters enjoy greater freedom to incorporate advertising time into their programs.
However, it should be noted that German public television broadcasters are only allowed to broadcast advertising
and teleshopping on national programs.
The AVMS Directive addresses sponsoring and product placement. Sponsoring is allowed subject to certain
conditions while product placement is prohibited, but Member States can introduce exceptions subject to certain
conditions.
With regard to product placement, the EU Member States have adopted different policies which do not sum up in a
‘best practice’ approach. This is due to the fact that Member States base their position on whether and to which
extent they seek to support media production by third party investors who request to have their products
displayed in a given production. In Germany for example, product placement is permitted in relation to cinema
movies, serials, and sports and light entertainment. There are, however, restrictions on tobacco products etc., and
product placement is not allowed in children’s programmes. The same goes for Denmark, while Austria has just
proposed such a solution in a draft law. Member states seem to have based their positions on this issue on ulterior
motives like investment and employment policy considerations.
Sponsoring is permissible in general if editorial freedom is not infringed upon but the display of event sponsor logos
is highly restricted. Sponsoring by tobacco companies is illegal, and often sponsorship of programmes dealing with
markets of interest to for the sponsoring organization is prohibited.
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