Recently, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce ("SAIC") and the Standardization Administration of China ("SAC") have jointly issued the Guidelines for Strengthening the Standardization in the Advertising Industry (the "Guidelines").
The Guidelines clearly state that, for technology and administrative requirements for the advertising sector that need to be unified nationwide, national standards and industrial standards, largely as the recommendatory ones, will be worked out for this purpose. Further, the Guidelines call for researching and drawing up some fundamental standards on jargons, categories and identifications for the advertising industry, other service standards on the entrustment, agency and release of advertisements, technical standards on the production, pushing and effect assessments of advertisements, standards on advertisement business administration, and standards on credits of business entities. Moreover, the Guidelines point out that standards for the advertising industry will be initially piloted in certain places with a high degree of marketization, ever-increasing technological innovations and regulated advertising activities. Also, the regime of enabling enterprises to announce and publish their own advertising standards should be established, in a bid to encourage enterprises to make public the advertisement standards they implement on the public service platform for information on corporate standards.