Concealed advertisements deserve disciplinary measures because they can damage program quality and editorial impartiality.

　　In a case cited by the electronic media watchdog, characters in a soap opera delivered ad slogans only thinly disguised as legitimate lines. “Buying these red cans (of a famous brand of soft drink) for a worship ritual will bring you luck,” has definitely more to do with making loads of money for the producers then with developing the plot of the drama.

　　TV programs or news segments that focus on particular businesses sometimes do occupy too much precious airtime that are then denied to airing more useful information or newsworthy stories.

　　However, sometimes it is difficult to draw the line between useful information and product placement. In another case, a cable news station was fined for the freeze-frame on a certain crocodile leather handbag during a story on how the company has cut its costs by breeding its own reptiles.

　　A luxury handbag brand keeping their own crocodiles is news for sure. Yet it is also imaginable that the cable station was in some sort of commercial arrangement to air those frozen frames.

　　Some critics of the NCC's decision maintained that the audience has the right to know. In some case it is productive to provide information showing where the good food and good buys are.

　　Some pointed out that an indirect commercial of Kaohsiung City was virtually everywhere in the Golden Bell award-winning drama “Black & White” due to it being the setting of the show. Such placement helps promote the beauty of Taiwan, so should they also be banned?

　　The NCC is right to require more impartial content from TV stations. The problem is that censorship and fines alone cannot help rein in the providers. In many cases, these measures may even smother editorial freedom.

　　Taiwan currently bans all kinds of market placement. Paradoxically, such practices help fan such promotion tactics because an indiscriminate ban actually blurs the line between placement and information.

Also, with limited resources, the NCC cannot crack down on every case of possible product placement included in this all-encompassing prohibition. As a result, the rulings by the watchdog often appear arbitrary.

　　What is needed is instead a set of clear regulations that emphasize not forbidding but on disclosing possible financial or commercial agreements between broadcasting companies and the companies they report on.

　　The so-called “payola rules” in the U.S. Federal Communication Commission (FCC) requires “that employees of broadcast stations, program producers, program suppliers and others who have accepted or agreed to receive payments, services, or other valuable consideration for airing material must disclose this fact.”

　　The requirement of information disclosure hands the power of censorship back to the public and the market. Programs with a heavy amount of product placements generally receive poorer ratings.

　　The current practice of many TV news stations in reporting on restaurants without naming them (in order to get around the NCC ban) is counterintuitive as such reports provide the audience with all types of information but the most basic one. By allowing the program to show the names of places along with full disclosure required by payola rules, TV stations can provide truly informative contents to the audience who can then discern if the program is valuable information or a prolonged advertisement.

　　If market regulation alone is not enough to cap placement promotions, the NCC can also work with mainstream media to establish a code of conduct to further establish ways to notify audiences of embedded advertisements in TV programs.

　　A similar code of conduct discussed by the Screen Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild recommends that placements should be pointed out clearly both in written words on screen and spoken orally and that regulations for children's programs should be even stricter.

　　In a controversial decision, the United States' FCC is applying payola rules on the Internet that will require both professional and amateur bloggers and Web site producers to disclose any rewards or freebies they have received from products they reviewed or mentioned.

　　As the Internet has gradually become the medium where most people receive information and entertainment, the NCC should also study ways to understand and then regulate possible embedded advertisements or preferential reports online.