Advertising Industry Codes of Practice for Radio Broadcasting

Rowan Smith; 0121
Thomas Allison; 0051
Samantha Grant; 0081

In the same way that we needed to consider the Advertising Industry Codes of Practice for our trailer, we also need to consider these for our radio advert.

Reactions to different adverts can be vastly different , and so each station has to take into account different adverts, and make responsible judgements to make sure all the sensitive areas have been considered when choosing which adverts to broadcast. Research shows that a significant number of listeners, such as under 16 year olds, will be listening at certain times, for example in the mornings or school holidays. We will need to take all of the regulations into consideration when creating our radio advert.

With reference to ‘Good taste, decency and offence to public feeling’ on the BCAP Radio Advertising Code, we will need to consider:

a) offensive and profane language must be avoided;

b) salacious, violent or indecent themes, or sexual innuendo or stereotyping likely to cause serious or general offence, should be avoided;

c) the handling of films, plays, music tracks or websites with salacious, violent or sexual themes and/or titles requires careful consideration. Audio clips should portray the product’s true nature but clips containing bad language, sexual innuendo and/or gratuitous violence should normally be avoided;

In order to abide by these rules, we will make sure that any dialogue we use from our film will be suitable, for example no swearing, and we will choose scenes that do not include violence or sexual innuendo.

‘Advertising must not harm listeners nor exploit, either personally or financially, their vulnerability. No advertising is acceptable from those who practise or advocate illegal or harmful, or potentially harmful behaviour. No advertisement may encourage or condone behaviour which is harmful or prejudicial to health and safety. This does not preclude responsible advertisements for products and services which, used to excess or abused, could endanger health or safety.’

This is another rule that we will need to observe when creating our radio advert. In order to do this, any content we will use from our film will not include violence or behaviour that jeopardises health and safety.

‘Advertisements must not exploit the superstitious and must not, without justifiable reason, play on fear. A ‘justifiable reason’, for example, would be where the aim of the advertisement was to influence listeners to take action to improve safety or welfare. An impression of a person under threat from fire or a car accident could be acceptable, for example, if their function was to persuade listeners respectively to fit smoke alarms in their homes or to wear seat belts.’

Although the genre of our film is a thriller, in order to not play on fear, we will make sure we don’t use any scenes that portray this within our radio advert.

‘Advertisements must not include sounds likely to create a safety hazard. Distracting or potentially alarming sound effects such as sirens, horns, screeching tyres, vehicle collisions and the like must be treated cautiously; they may be dangerous to those listening, especially whilst driving. In particular, they should avoid being featured at the start of advertisements, before listeners are clear about what they are listening to.’

This rule is particularly important for us to consider when we create the radio advert for our film. Because the radio advert will be listened to when people are in their cars, we have to consider the fact that any sudden noises or screaming etc could affect the health and safety of listeners. In order to abide by this, we will aim to avoid using any noises such as this, but any noises we do use will not be at the beginning of our advert, and will be slightly muted in order to make them quieter.