Greens attack advertising too

If you thought I was exaggerating when I wrote yesterday about the impact of climate-change protests on business events, take a look at this piece from FIPP, the magazine publishers' association, on initiatives in Brussels to clamp down on car advertising. It notes:

By adopting the advertising and labelling part of this report, the [European] Parliament supports the idea that car ads should devote a fixed amount of space (20 per cent) to public policy messages.

This report contains six paragraphs on advertising and labelling requirements for car advertising that would infringe on the freedom of commercial communication, as they suggest how the car industry has to inform the consumer about environmental aspects of the advertised car.

It's not hard to see this extending to airline advertising and then to advertising promoting travel to international events. Happily, most of the world does not share Brussels' perverse enthusiasm for regulation and we probably won't be seeing anything like this in Asia for the foreseeable future. But many of the Asia B2B industry's clients are much closer to that unholy alliance of Eurocrats and climate change nutters and may well be affected by it.