The Union of Open Commercial Televisions (UTECA) has filed a complaint with the National Competition Market Commission (CNMC) for the commercial offer of the RTVE entertainment program Grand Prix, which includes the sale to advertisers of “spots”, Program sponsorship masks and self-promotion sponsorship.
In its complaint letter, UTECA requests the CNMC to urge the Public Corporation to cease marketing advertising or commercial communications other than sponsorships and, in particular, what it is currently known to be doing: advertising spots and sponsorships. of self-promotions.
With the information available to it, UTECA considers that the conditions of this commercial offer exceed the limits and, therefore, breach the provisions of Law 8/2009 on the financing of the Spanish Radio and Television Corporation, which generally established the prohibition of advertising broadcast on the public channel.
Exceptionally, the aforementioned regulation only allows the issuance of sponsorship of programs in general, but the rest of the conditions offered by RTVE to its advertising clients in Grand Prix (“spots”, and sponsorship of self-promotions) would only be allowed if it were of a cultural program.
Grand Prix is ??an entertainment program, defined as such on the RTVE website itself. Therefore, “it is not a documentary, informative, or educational program, it is a pure entertainment program and the cultural content does not take precedence over the entertainment one.” Given its content and the genre to which it is registered, the known commercial offer of said space “breaches the prohibition of issuance of advertising contemplated by law.”
The complaint filed includes the request for precautionary measures due to the proximity of the release date, in addition to the reduced number of editions planned. UTECA argues before the CNMC that the provisional suspension of the sale of Grand Prix advertising spaces is “necessary and urgent” to ensure “the effectiveness of the measure”, in addition to “avoiding the unwanted effects that it may entail for the rest of the providers the deduction of revenue from the advertising market”.
According to UTECA’s knowledge, the damage in the market is already taking place due to the contracting by advertisers of the advertising spaces offered by RTVE, “a damage that in the market will be irreversible given the minimum time necessary for advertising contracting, taking into account It also tells that the program is made up of only seven chapters,” according to the information released.
UTECA associates allocate a percentage of their income to financing RTVE, in compliance with Law 8/2009 on the financing of the Spanish Radio and Television Corporation-
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