IV.Compliance Points of Advertiser

According to Article 2.2 of the Advertising Law, advertiser in the Advertising Law means a natural person, a legal person, or any other organization that designs, produces, and publishes advertisements or authorizes any other person to do so for the purpose of marketing its goods or services, which is what we usually refer to as “brand parties”.Chinese law has many requirements for the compliance of brand parties with respect to advertising business.The core part will be introduced from the following two perspectives.

1.Business operation specifications.According to Article 30, Article 31, and Article 32 of the Advertising Law, relevant subjects shall pay attention to the following items when operating advertising business: (1)advertisers, advertising agents, and advertisement publishers shall, in accordance with the law, enter into written contracts among them in their advertising activities; (2) it is prohibited to conduct any form of unfair competition in their advertising activities; (3) the advertising agents or advertisement publishers authorized by advertisers to design and produce or publish advertisements shall be legally qualified to engage in such business.The “legal business qualifications” here require special attention from advertisers, and professional lawyers can be entrusted to perform due diligence when needed.(https://www.daowen.com)

2.Advertising content specification.For the requirements of advertising content compliance, please refer to “II.Compliance points of Advertising Content (General Specifications)” and “Compliance points of Advertising Content (Special Specifications)” of this Part.The advertiser’s responsibility for compliance with advertising content mainly lies in the following: (1) an advertiser shall be responsible for the veracity of contents of advertisement; (2) according to Article 33 of the Advertising Law,to use the name or image of any other person in advertising, an advertiser or advertising agent shall obtain the written consent of the person in advance; or to use the name or image of a person without civil competency or a person with limited civil competency, the advertiser or advertising agent shall obtain the written consent of the person’s guardian in advance; (3) article 46 of the Advertising Law clarif ies that before any advertisement on a medical service, drug, medical instrument, pesticide,veterinary drug, or functional food or any other advertisement subject to censorship in accordance with the provisions of laws and administrative regulations is published, the relevant department shall censor the contents of the advertisement.An advertiser applying for advertisement censorship shall submit the relevant certification documents to the advertisement censoring authority.

With the increasing development of the Internet, the form of Internet advertisement has become more popular.The newly released Interim Measures for the Administration of Internet Advertising specifically stipulates the behavioral norms of Internet advertisers.For example, Internet advertisers shall have the authentic, lawful and valid entity identification, administrative licensing, citations, and other certification documents which are required for an advertiser to publish an Internet advertisement; when an Internet advertiser which authorizes an Internet advertising agent or advertisement publisher to publish an advertisement revises the content of the advertisement, it shall, in writing or by any other means which may be confirmed, notify the Internet advertising agent or advertisement publisher which provides services to it.