La formation de l'espace publicitaire européen : la liberté d'expression commerciale, en quête de légitimité

摘要

In the 1980s, while the deregulation of broadcasting picked up speed across Europe, advertising industry trade associations equated «commercial speech» with «free speech» and placed renewed stress on the importance of self-regulation. In the debate on «Television without Frontiers» in the European Community and the Council of Europe, advertising trade associations -representing advertisers, agencies and the media-emphasize that self-regulation should prevail over the harmonization of state policies towards broadcasting. Public organization themselves rely for data about advertising industry and markets on the very lobbies who advocate self-regulation. In the absence of «independent» sources, one can argue that trade associations have succeeded in founding part of their legitimacy on «questionable» statistics.