By Seb Lynch, Copy Development manager
The popularity of CBD has grown significantly over the past few years due to media coverage about its potential health benefits amongst other factors. Whilst the majority of CBD advertising has been seen online up to now, we’re gradually seeing it extend to our TV screens and don’t see this slowing down anytime soon.
A rise in CBD TV Advertising
At Clearcast we’re getting more and more enquiries from agencies representing CBD advertisers. There is usually a sense of uncertainty about whether CBD products can be advertised on UK TV and if so, what the ads can say.
Legal CBD products can be advertised on TV in the UK.
To be considered legal, ingested CBD products need to have novel food status granted from the Food Standards Agency. Novel foods are foods that haven’t been widely consumed by people in the UK or European Union (EU) before May 1997. This means that the foods don’t have a ‘history of consumption’.
The ASA published a more in-depth look at the complexities around defining CBD products when looking to advertise them.
As oral CBD products are considered a food, they fall under the Nutrition and Health Claim Regulation which states that only authorised nutrition and health claims can be made in food advertising.
Since there are no authorised claims for CBD, it means that your ad can’t talk about those potential health benefits being discussed elsewhere in the media. This makes creating a compliant ad challenging.
Just because there aren’t explicit health claims in your ad, it might still contain implied claims that we aren’t able to clear for broadcast. Nevertheless, we want to help you get your ad to air, so if we can help find a way to work within the code to get your ad approved, we will.
Helping Cannaray’s ‘CBD Revolution’ campaign get to air
We have experience in getting CBD brands to air like the recent Cannaray campaign which Stephen Lepitak, Adweek’s Europe Bureau Chief, wrote about recently in Ad Week. We worked with creative agency BigSmall to make sure the ad would work within the BCAP Code and find a way to get their progressive ad to air.
Matt from BigSmall agency commented, “In this case, with Cannaray being one of the very first CBD brands in the U.K. to advertise on TV, we worked closely with Clearcast’s copy development team at the very earliest stage of script development, which made for a really smooth approval process.”
If you’d like help to develop an ad for your CBD product, get in touch with our Copy Development team who has experience in a broad range of advertising sectors with complicated code rules.
We help advertisers get great ads to air
We take pride in helping advertisers push boundaries to get innovative and sometimes, groundbreaking ads to air that might just change the course of advertising for years to come. We’re here to support that progression by helping you work within the code without straying from your original creative too much if we can.
If you have questions about advertising CBD products contact Seb and for any other enquiries, please get in touch.
