ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how the advertising of an individual product category has been regulated, examines the ways in which public reaction to this category is tested, measured and assessed, and the contribution the information obtained through this process makes to the task of adjudicating between various competing sets of interests. It focuses on how regulators exercise control in practice, especially the key decision-making body the Advertising Advisory Committee. The content of Sanitary Protection (San-pro) advertising was nonetheless on the agenda of the Advertising Advisory Committee when it debated the Vespre Silhouette issue. The 20-year history of san-pro advertising regulation in Britain represents a microcosm of advertising regulation in general. If regulators and commercial decision-makers had hoped that any negative response to san-pro on television would be more muted this time round, they were to be disappointed. Qualitative and quantitative surveys are regularly commissioned by the Authority, the television companies and, more recently, by the Broadcasting Standards Council.
