M2 Legal and ethical

 

Unit 15 M2 Legal & ethical

As a part of a team, I have created an advert for S. Media. The advert should be 3 minutes long and will contain multiple hooks, educates and call to actions. We created the advert for Powerbeats Pro earphones, and, because this is an advert we must take into account legal, ethical and moral issues to ensure the advert is suitable for everyone.

BBFC, ASA and Ofcom are regulatory bodies that control laws concerning adverts and TV, where BBFC controls film and TV age rating to ensure they are appropriate for a specific age group. BBFC will impact our advertisement as we want to ensure it is suitable for everyone. Films and TV are rated by use of violence, dugs, sexually explicit images, swearing and dangerous stunts/behaviour; each age group is rated on a scale from U (Universal), PG, 12A, 12, 15, 18. The goal of our advert is to make sure it is rated a U to make sure everyone can watch it, so we will avoid using any themes listed above.

Ofcom regulates TV, radio and on demand services and mobile service content. They are able to receive complaints about these too and they will act on them if they deem that product to need re-regulating. Ofcom will regulate if the advert is suitable or not suitable to go on TV or on demand services, depending on the content in them.

ASA regulates adverts to ensure they are appropriate and not misleading and that they are lawful. For example, if we said our product was waterproof that would be misleading and ASA would take action against that.

We need to follow copyright laws as copyright laws protect a person or company’s work being used without their consent and to get permission to use the work you must pay for royalty fees. To ensure we follow this law, we can use royalty free content or ask for permission to use the assets. Creative commons licenses ensure you can use the content but rules set by the owner must be followed, there are multiple creative commons such as non-commercial and non-derivatives. Royalty free assets are free to use and you don’t have to follow any rules or laws, which may be better than creative commons. If we don’t follow the copyright laws then we may face copright strikes and claims and we may be issued fines or be sued. Our group wanted to avoid this so we fimed  our own content so it is our own Intellectual property considering we created this using our own minds.

Libel and Slander are also laws we need to follow to ensure our advert is suitable. Libel is written as a published statement that can damage an individuals reputation whereas slander is spoken and is a false statement that can also damage a persons reputation. In accordance with these laws we wont say or write any false or harmful statements in our video.

Ethical

To make sure our advert doesn’t contain any offensive content and that it is suitable for everyone, we must consider ethical issues, which are: offensive and disturbing imagery, racism, homophobia, body image and sexism. Offensive or disturbing imagery also means any violence, gore or horror that our advert could contain. As we are making this advert to be aimed at everyone we wont use any offensive material, and we wont include any racism of any forms, sexism, homophobia and any other ethical issues.

Moral

We must ensure our advert contains the product we are advertising. The advert must not exaggerate the features of the powerbeats and we cannot exaggerate any statistics in the advert as that is misleading and false.

 

In conclusion, I will use royalty free content or my own content to avoid coyright issues. Also, I wont include anything inappropriate because I want my advert to be rated U to have the maximum possible audience and to ensure it is suitable for TV and web based services like YouTube. I wont make any claims that are false or misleading and wont exaggerate any of the features and statistics because that would go against ASA’s rules & regulations. I will ensure all legal, ethical and moral issues are my top priority when planning the pre-production of the advert to the end of post-production, which includes my script, storyboard, notes etc to the final edited product.