Advertisers to clean up act

A new draft Advertising Law up for discussion at the 13th National Assembly’s ongoing second session aims to stop advertising hoardings and ribbons being hung across roads and streets and on electricity poles, traffic lights and public notice boards.

These unmanaged forms of advertising were blighting every locality in the country, according to the National Assembly’s Committee for Culture, Education, Youth and Children (CCEYC).
But under Article 33 of the draft law authorities will have to draw up advertising plans and advertisers will be required to follow these to the letter.

Proposed rules include having to include the names and addresses of people who are responsible for the advertisements. Their content also must be submitted to the local Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism for approval seven days before they are placed.
The government will issue details of their size and how to prepare submission dossiers for departments.

Under a draft decree looking at fines, offenders will be penalised to the tune of VND2.5-50 million ($125-$2,500) for different violations. For example, advertisers who put up hoardings in a banned location could be up for a fine of some VND3-45 million ($1,750-$2,250).

Violators who don’t take down signs or ribbons on time or whose advertisements are too large will face a fine of VND50 million ($2,500). CCEYC’s chairman Dao Trong Thi said the existing Advertising Ordinance issued in 2001 was unclear on regulations for open-air advertising on boards and ribbons and the situation was now under control.

For instance, Ho Chi Minh City’s People’s Committee reported that over the past nine years municipal authorities had seized about 18,000 illegal advertising hoardings and ribbons and forbidden the use of over 1,000 telephone numbers of advertising services. The authorities also imposed fines in nearly 6,000 cases. In Hanoi, the city’s authorities last year imposed total fines of VND451 million ($451,000) on 109 violators.

“Advertising boards and ribbons should be hung or placed at locations where advertising is allowed. There also needs to be regulations on the time frame for the boards and ribbons to be hung,” said Le Quoc Vinh, general director of locally-owned Le Bros Company, one of Vietnam’s leaders in advertising and event organisation. Dang Thi Hung, a representative from the Ministry of Information and Communications’ Legislation Department, said she was fully in favour of stricter regulations on this type of advertising.

“But, in order to strict manage it, more specific regulations must be made, while authorities’ responsibility for managing it must be defined,” Hung said. The team compiling the draft law said they were open to these ideas. According to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the number of Vietnam’s advertising firms had grown from around 1,000 in 2002 to nearly 7,000 now. Their total revenue was estimated at $900 million last year.

Vietnam currently has 30 foreign-invested advertising firms and over 30 representative offices of overseas advertising firms. They have an 80 per cent share of the country’s advertising market share.