Eureka! Institutional Repository

Many advertising agencies would argue that they cannot regulate advertising messages because this creates an oxymoron schema: how would the advertising agency commit himself/ herself if advertising communication itself as a procedure is a free expression of ideas and cannot be controlled? The aim of this specific paper is to put emphasis on the necessity of the presence of the advisory control in the advertising creation process, as a way of self regulation -apart from the existence of the system of state legislative mechanism using Greece as a case study. We argue that even if the advertising agencies validated the Greek Code of Advertising-Communication (GCAC), there are violations made to the articles of GCAC. Content analysis and descriptive statistics were used for the examination of an 8 year period since the first complaints about the content of advertising messages at the end of 2003 were submitted at the Council for the Regulation of Communication in Greece in a total of 452 cases. The most frequently violated articles include those of human dignity, misleading advertising, honesty and indirect defamation in comparison to other articles of GCAC that are not violated. Suggestions are made on the education of people who are directly or indirectly involved with advertising for the adoption of responsibility and self-regulation within the framework of the communication of the advertiser with society