Highly awaited and feared by professionals, the advertising component of the future Pompili bill on ecological transition would rather spare the sector.
This is what emerges from the working document that Minister Barbara Pompili presented to parliamentarians on Monday and Tuesday and which must be sent to all parties to the discussion (advertisers, advertisers and the media).
If some arbitrations have been stopped, several avenues of regulation are still on the table.
If there were to be general bans, they should ultimately only target advertising for fossil fuels, which have the greatest impact on the climate (oil and coal in particular).
The government would therefore reject one of the proposals of the 150 members of the Citizen's Climate Convention, the final text of which served as the basis for the drafting of the bill: that of banning advertising for products with high emissions of CO2, a measure that was aimed in particular at the automotive (manufacturers) and aviation (companies) sectors or certain household appliances that consume large amounts of energy.
Among the many requests resulting from the Citizen's Convention of June, the working text nevertheless retained some common sense prohibitions, such as air-powered advertising (advertising banners towed by planes near beaches during the summer) or the illuminated advertising between 1 am and 6 am.
Large advertising panels of more than 10m2 are also in the viewfinder.
"
In terms of display, the idea would be to give mayors the power to regulate the display of advertising in public space to reduce the scope
", explains in the entourage of the Minister.
A Carbon-score to rate the products
The heart of the bill has yet to be articulated in intensity and time.
One of the main avenues under study is the possibility of banning, over a horizon that remains to be defined, advertising for the products or services that emit the most CO2.
On the model of the Nutri-score which already exists in food, a Carbon-score would make it possible to label products by assigning them a score which would determine their advertising status.
The lowest rated would be deprived of it.
However, the difficulty remains to define at what level the cursor should be placed and within what timeframe the bans - if this path is chosen - could fall.
A first "flexible" method would consist in entering into the law voluntary commitments on the part of advertisers and the media, sanctionable by the Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA).
This is the meaning of the "Climate Media Contract" proposed last week by national and local audiovisual groups (TF1, M6, NRJ, NextRadioTV, Les Indés Radios ...) who say they want to "
act in favor of ecological transition
" .
This contract would be placed under the aegis and control of the CSA.
A harsher approach would be to legislate more or less short-term bans on products that are most harmful to the environment.
There is debate.
While Minister Barbara Pompili would lean for this "hard" path, Bercy and Culture would advocate voluntary commitment spread over a reasonable timeframe, in order to avoid too much destabilization of the communication ecosystem and the media that live for a large share of advertising.
Discussions should continue in the coming weeks, the objective of the Ministry of Ecological Transition being to present its project to the Council of Ministers at the end of January, for measures that could be partly applicable from January 1, 2022.
