Advertising Self-Regulation & the JEP
The JEP acts as the self-disciplinary body for Belgium's advertising sector. Its role is to ensure the correctness and fairness of advertising messages to the public.
Advertising Self-Regulation & the JEP
All ACC members have signed the ACC Charter in which they declare to adhere to the recommendations of the Communicatie Centrum/Centre de la Communication and the decisions of the JEP (Jury for Ethical Practices in advertising) regarding ethical communication.
General codes
The basic principles that need to be respected in all commercial communications can be found in the first chapter of the International Chamber of Commerce’s Code on Advertising and Marketing Communication Practice (ICC Code) (in Dutch here / in French here ), all marketing communications should be legal, decent, honest and truthful, and should be prepared with a due sense of social and professional responsibility. Some of these broadly formulated rules are further specified in the JEP Rules on the representation of persons (in Dutch here / in French here ).
A recent recommendation by the Communicatie Centrum/Centre de la Communication deals with gender and stereotypes in advertising, with the purpose to increase our sense of responsibility and avoid disrespectful stereotyping. Download these Gender guidelines below.
All codes that are applied by the JEP can be found on its website www.jep.be. The Communicatie Centrum/Centre de la Communication moreover published a booklet with the most important legal and self-regulatory texts regarding advertising: its electronic version is available free of charge to ACC members.
Sectoral codes
There are also several advertising codes for specific categories of products and services, most notably.
• Convention on Alcohol Advertising & Marketing (in Dutch here / in French here)
• Food Advertising Code (FEVIA Code) (in Dutch here / in French here)
• Car Advertising Code (FEBIAC Code) (in Dutch here / in French here)
• Cosmetics Advertising Code (DETIC Code) (in Dutch here / in French here)
• Recommendations regarding native advertising (in Dutch here in French here)
• Detergents and cleaning products (DETIC Code) (in Dutch here/ in French here)
Copy advice
Finally, when in doubt, agencies (or their clients) can always ask the JEP for copy advice.
You have an option between some advice from the back office – limited in scope to an overview of the relevant rules and Jury decisions – or a full-fledged advice by the Jury itself – who is entitled to actually (conditionally) approve the submitted ads. Indeed, the latter type of advice is binding for the Jury in case of later complaints.
More info on www.jep.be or in the document below.
In this document you’ll find the competences of JEP, their advice demands processes, the convenant Alcohol and the gender guidelines.
