Who: The Hungarian Parliament
Where: Budapest
When: June 2015
Law stated as at: 14 July 2015
What happened:
Hungary has recently passed transparency legislation a little like France’s 1993 Loi Sapin.
The law impacts advertising intermediaries, ad services providers, sellers of advertising space and advertisers.
The new legislation (published as Act LXXII of 2015 on Establishing the Central Budget of Hungary for Year 2016 in the official gazette of Hungary on 18 June 2015) came into force, by all accounts, on 4 July 2015 and parties to existing agreements that include inconsistent provisions will have until 30 September 2015 to modify them.
Under the “Bonus Act”:
- advertising intermediaries are prohibited from accepting any direct or indirect bonus, rebate, gift or other gain from the media owner or any other person;
- advertising intermediaries may agree to a discount; but it must be passed on to the advertising customer and indicated as such on the invoice issued to the customer;
- media agency agreements must be in writing and must include certain mandatory provisions.
Why this matters:
Following on some 22 years after France’s agency transparency law, this development could hardly be said to show a rapidly gathering head of steam behind Europe-wide anti ad rebate laws.
There can be little doubt, however, that, fuelled particularly by the exponential growth of all things “adtech,” with real time “programmatic” buying of online banner ad space in the vanguard, there is increasing concern worldwide around opaque digital media buying practices.
Against that backdrop, Hungary’s legislators may just have given advertisers across Europe more heft in their arguments for open book accounting when it comes to online media sales.
