Advertisement
Media is one of the most important channels for advertisement, whereas the advertisement is the major source of financing the media.
Advertisement is a marketing communication, targeting an indefinite amount of persons and aimed at promoting or selling a products, services and ideas. Advertisement may be of commercial, political and social nature:
- Commercial Advertisement – an advertisement that promotes an entrepreneur or enterprise, goods, rights, obligations, service or work, a person, idea or initiative or aids the trade of goods, rights, obligations, service or work, the implementation of an idea or initiative in exchange for remuneration or any other economic profit.
- Political/Pre-election Advertisement – advertisement that promotes a political party, election subject or political issues, or on the contrary, aims at pursuing a campaign against a specific subject.
- Social Advertisement– an advertisement that promotes public good and charitable aim, that is neither commercial or election advertisement nor advertisement of a legal entity of public law, or a governmental organization, as well as advertisement of the services provided by them.
Advertisement may also be unethical, unreliable, done in bad faith, misleading. Responsibility over the content of the advertisement lies with the advertiser and not the communication channel used for its dissemination.
Rules of running an advertisement
- In order to prevent misleading a society, to maintain editorial independence and to avoid the distortion of editorial material in exchange of financial benefit in a form of a shadow advertisement.
- To separate editorial content from advertisement material clearly, so that the audience will not perceive a content prepared by an interested party as an editorial material of a journalist. To this end, the advertisement brandmark should be clearly identifiable on an advertisement product.
- Participation of an anchor of news, current affairs program and pre-election debates and journalist in an advertisement is prohibited, as it may negatively affect the reliability and trustworthiness of the materials with informative content.
Why is the shadow advertisement problematic?
- Customer receives a funded, biased information as a reliable and objective news verified by journalist and thus misleads audience;
- Media income is concealed and taxes evaded;
- Shadow advertisement corrupts media.