swimming on the roof - the pleasures of advertising

today's China Post editorial:

Advertisers really need to clean up their act

Hau Lung-bin's Taipei City Government clashed recently with councilors over its plans to charge outdoor advertisers an installation permission fee and a cityscape impact fee. Mayor Hau claimed the proposed act aimed to make Taipei a tidier, greener and more beautiful city, while some councilors claimed it was merely a stealth tax to raise revenues, and said that if advertisements really disfigured the city they should simply be removed.

That debate is still in its early stages and it remains to be seen what, if anything, Hau's administration can achieve in curbing excessive and ugly in-your-face marketing. Meanwhile, with regard to the content of advertisements, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) under the Executive Yuan continues its dogged pursuit of companies that make “false, untrue and misleading representation as to the quality of products” and thereby violate Article 21(1) of the Fair Trade Act.

This newspaper frequently reports the more egregious cases of such misrepresentation. Most recently, for example, the Post carried the news of Farglory Realty being fined for falsely claiming to be the only construction company in operation for 40 years, and of Chinatrust Commercial Bank, fined for encouraging credit-card use with prizes of high speed rail upgrades it was unable to provide.

The next day there was an item about a manufacturer and shopping channel that were both fined for a commercial claiming a detergent was the most popular in Japan.

Retailer Carrefour and supplier P&G were fined for stating that 95 percent of fathers considered Braun electric shavers their preferred gift for last year's Father's Day, seemingly having forgotten to mention that the companies' survey targeted customers who had already received free products worth NT$12,800.

These recent examples might seem trivial or even entertaining, but scrutiny of the FTC's monthly “decisions” shows that other false advertising endangers people's health, preys on consumers' insecurities about facial or bodily appearance, or targets people in financial difficulty.

For example, the FTC recently penalized one company for claiming its faucet “completely eliminated residual pesticides on fruits and vegetables,” another — as well as the TV channel running the ad — for alleging its charcoal underpants could help men regain fertility, and a third for suggesting 10 minutes spent using its exerciser was equivalent to a 60-minute sprint.
Most frequent transgressors of Article 21(1) appear to be realtors and construction companies. Typically, balconies are included as indoor space, and people signing up for homes with billiards, ping-pong, gym or exercise rooms sometimes find they are nothing more than motorcycle parking areas or administration offices. One company was fined for labeling a fire water tank on the roof as a top-floor swimming pool.

Modern life would be unimaginable without advertising, of course. Newspapers, magazines and television stations would disappear overnight, and the Internet would shrivel to its original military and academic applications. And there is nothing new in fraudulent advertising: more than a thousand years ago, Norseman Erik the Red is said to have sailed west from Iceland claiming he was leading settlers to a new utopian “green land.”

But this is not to excuse these construction companies' exaggerated claims -— after all, people's purchase of a new home is often the single largest expenditure they will make in their lifetime — nor those of other loose-mouthed advertisers. They do a disservice to their own profession, and undermining consumer confidence is in no one's interest, especially with the economy in its currently precarious state.

They also endanger the reputations of the media organizations in which they advertise. Readers do not buy newspapers for the advertisements but for their coverage of news, features, sports and so forth. Their reputations for truthfulness, accuracy and unbiased presentation of facts have been built issue by issue, report by report, over the preceding decades, but can be lost overnight through unprofessional reporting, political or commercial interference, or carelessness.
This extends to advertising. Thus media organizations must themselves be the first line of defense against fraudulent or misleading advertisements, and the FTC, backed by the Fair Trade Act, is right to penalize the media as well as advertisers for transgressions. But the Commission must be given more teeth, so that it can become proactive in pursuing wrong doers rather than responding to complaints — many of which come from rival companies — and the Act should be toughened so that meaningful penalties can be imposed. Carrefour's penalty in the above-mentioned case was just NT$100,000, and the fine of NT$50,000 levied on the “ozone germicidal faucet” company was similarly derisory.

One cable TV channel has even been known to intentionally court such paltry fines as a means of gaining name recognition that is cheaper than orthodox advertising.

While it is too late for those Icelanders lured to a barren wasteland, it is not for Taiwan's citizens. Media organizations and the FTC must work together to clean up the nation's advertising.