Advertising, Host Selling and

Host selling refers to a form of advertising that uses program talent, including animated cartoon characters and “live” program hosts, to deliver commercials. Such character endorsement may confuse children and keep them from distinguishing between program and nonprogram material. An example is an advertisement for Bananas in Pajamas toy characters airing during the children's program of the same name.

Host selling has been an area of concern for children's advocates for decades, largely due to children's nature as a special audience. Research suggests that children do not have the cognitive ability to differentiate between programs and ads until the age of 4 or 5, and do not recognize the persuasive attempt inherent in advertising until the age of 7 or 8. As a result, many feel that advertising to children can be unfair and have sought to regulate it.

In 1974, Action for Children's Television (ACT) petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to require broadcast licensees to air an hour of educational programming for children each day, and to ban licensees from airing ads directed at preschoolers. In response to the petition and other pressure, the FCC issued a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) and two Notices of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM), eventually resulting in the Children's TV Policy Statement. Among other guidelines, the statement discouraged host selling and restricted program-length commercials (PLCs), a similar form of advertising in which commercials for a product are aired during a program associated with a product (e.g., a commercial announcement for a Sonic hand-held game broadcast during the Sonic the Hedgehog program). The statement was not a rule, and therefore violations of it did not result in fines. Rather, it was a license renewal processing guideline, suggesting that licensees who wanted the greatest likelihood of having their licenses renewed should adhere to it.

Due to its lack of enforcement powers, advocates of advertising restrictions were not entirely satisfied and continued to press the issue. As a result, Congress took the unusual step of funding an FCC Task Force in 1978 to examine children's television. In 1980, the FCC issued another NPRM to consider making the guidelines into administrative laws, or rules. However, the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 ushered in an era of deregulation and the relaxation, rather than codification, of the advertising guidelines.

Critics of advertising to children persevered, and in 1990 Congress passed the Children's Television Act of 1990. In addition to other provisions, the act's rules prohibit both PLCs and host selling, and they [Page 38]apply to both commercial and noncommercial television broadcast stations (a noncommercial television station is impacted by the host selling policy if it airs a sponsorship announcement featuring the same characters that appear in the immediately adjacent children's program). The commercial limitations went into effect on January 1, 1992.

In 2004, the FCC revisited children's programming obligations to update them for the digital world. In addition to upholding the existing host selling and PLC rules, the new rules also ban host selling Web links or Web addresses that are promoted in a show and that use characters from that show to sell a product. These newer rules, which went into effect on January 1, 2006, are currently at the center of a legal battle in which Viacom, the parent company of children's television network Nickelodeon, is suing in federal court in Washington, D.C., asking that the rules be thrown out or remanded on the basis that they are unconstitutional and that they pose an economic hardship on stations that would be forced to redesign existing programming and websites. At the same time, the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ, led by former FCC commissioner Gloria Tristani, filed suit in federal court in Cincinnati asking for a strengthening of the rules. With both activists and the TV industry threatening lawsuits, a compromise agreement was reached in December 2005 that eased some restrictions but maintained others. This was contingent on FCC agreement to the compromise. However, in March 2006, the FCC issued a second Notice of Proposed Rule Making about the matter and is currently collecting public comment on how the issue should be handled.

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