Government tightening online advertising regulations in China

From September 1, the “Internet Ad Interim Measures,” issued by the State Administration for Industry and Commerce of China will come into effect.

The new regulation for China online advertising clearly requires internet advertising should be clearly distinguishable and marked “advertisement” in a prominent position.

It provides a definition for internet advertising :

Internet advertising is advertisements that directly or indirectly sell commercial goods or services through the websites, web pages, internet applications and other forms of Internet media including text, images, audio, video and etc.

Baidu used “promotion” in grey font color to identify the paid listing in search results, with which most China internet users could not tell the commercial nature of the ad.

Baidu added a “commercial” text in front of “promotion” recently with blue font color. With the new regulation, Baidu’s current paid search listings are now clearly tagged with “advertisement”:

The new regulation has an impact on social media, especially WeChat and Weibo paid content. Besides official advertising offerings from Weibo and WeChat, some marketers often pay individual users to publish carefully crafted messages on WeChat Moments or Weibo feed stream to indirectly promote advertisers’ products or services; and, they are rarely labeled or claimed as either “paid” or “ads”.

It also states online ads should not affect the normal use of the internet. Ads such as pop-ups must be prominently marked with a close sign to ensure one-click close. And, it disallows ads to entice users click on the ad content. No ads or links to ads are allowed in emails to users without permission.

Also read: China digital media usage 2016