Formosa Television

1278th Commissioners' Meeting (2016)

Case:

FTV was complained for violating the Fair Trade Law for announcement of the audience rating for its "Dowry" series

Keyword(s):

TV series, audience rating, advertisement

Reference:

Fair Trade Commission Decision of May 4, 2016 (the 1278th Commissioners' Meeting)

Industry:

Television Broadcasting and Subscription Programming (6020)

Relevant Law(s):

Article 21 and 25 of the Fair Trade Law

Summary:

1. A private citizen filed a complaint about Formosa Television (hereinafter referred to as FTV) claiming in TV commercials and on Facebook that its series "Dowry" had the "highest audience rating, way ahead of the shows of other stations" without disclosing any audience rating statistics to support the above claim. Therefore, a violation of the Fair Trade Law was suspected.

2. Findings of the FTC after investigation:

   According to the results of Nielsen ratings, the 179 episodes of "Dowry" were aired from December 16, 2014 to August 24, 2015. Besides December 16, 2014 the day the show was first aired and July 22, 23, 24 and 27, 2015 on which the "Shi Jian Qing" series on SETTV had the best rating, "Dowry" was the most popular show (about 97%). Meanwhile, the DVDs recording of "Dowry" episodes provided by the National Communications Commission indicated that when its audience rating was No. 2, FTV still broadcasted the wording with the narration of "No. 1 in the country" and "Dowry--No. 1 in the country." On the Facebook wall for "Dowry", FTV also posted the wording of "Highest audience rating in the country, way ahead of the shows of all other stations" from July 1, 2015 until August 5 the same year. To collect further information, the FTC sent written requests to businesses buying commercials on the show to express their opinions. All the advertisers replied that their commercial purchase decisions and budget arrangements had never been affected by the temporary audience rating fluctuations or the audience rating claim broadcasted.

3. Grounds for disposition:

   (1)

   When FTV broadcasted the claim of "No. 1 in the country" in July 2015, it was televised together with preview footages of the "Dowry" series with narration saying "No. 1 in the country, Dowry." It did deliver the impression to its audience that the show had the highest audience rating in the country. In this aspect, the TV station did not fulfill its obligation as the advertiser to assure the authenticity of the commercial content. In July 2015 when the audience rating of the show dropped to the second place and the wording posted on TV commercials and Facebook remained unchanged, it was false advertising. However, the results of audience measurement surveys from the Nielsen Company indicated that the Audience rating of "Dowry" did rank No. 1 for 97% of the time in the six-month period. In other words, the long-term audience rating of the show was indeed ahead of the shows broadcasted by other TV stations. There were four days in July 2015 when the audience rating of "Dowry" fell behind that of "Shi Jian Qing" but the margin was slight. Therefore, the difference between the claim from FTV and the reality was still acceptable to the public. Finally, the main advertisers on "Dowry" all expressed that their decisions to buy commercial time on the show and budget arrangements had never been affected by the short-term audience rating fluctuations or the content of the claim posted by FTV. For this reason, the FTC could not conclude that the advertisers had been misled by the claim at issue when making their decisions on transactions with FTV. In other words, there was no need to cite Article 21 of the Fair Trade Law to sanction FTV.

   (2)

   To maintain trading order in the audience rating survey market and prevent enterprises from lying about or concealing audience rating survey results to engage in unfair competition and in turn affect the audience rating survey market as well as to ensure the sound development of the TV industry, the FTC has specifically promulgated the "Fair Trade Commission Disposal Directions (Guidelines) on the Release of TV Ratings." It is set forth in Point 6 that the release of TV rating survey results shall include the name of the survey company, the time, range, objects and method of survey, the margin of error and the number of valid samples, so that when an enterprise announces TV survey results, all related information and data are available and the interests of competitors will not be affected and TV viewers will not be misguided. The findings of the FTC's investigation revealed that FTV had indeed failed to disclose the related TV rating survey results when announcing the audience rating of the show on its TV and Facebook. Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, all the major advertisers confirmed that their decisions to purchase commercials on the show and budget arrangements had not been affected by the claim about the audience rating of "Dowry" at all. Therefore, the FTC found it difficult to conclude that FTV had engaged in any deceptive or obviously unfair conduct that was able to affect trading order in violation of Article 25 of the Fair Trade Law.