New guidelines to streamline advertising

2/09/09
New guidelines to
streamline advertising


Story: Musah Yahaya Jafaru
FOUR institutions have come up with guidelines to prevent the haphazard mounting of advertising billboards and to ensure standard designs for billboards in the country.
A technical team from the National Standards Board (NSB), the Department of Urban Roads (DUR), the Advertising Association of Ghana (AAG) and the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), drew up the guidelines to bring sanity into the operations of outdoor advertisers.
A traffic engineer with the DUR, Mrs Pat Onny, made this known at a seminar on the new guidelines for members of the AAG in Accra on Tuesday.
She noted that “there is chaos in the placing of billboards”, and therefore the guidelines sought to regulate the citing of billboards in terms of spacing and sizes.
For instance, Mrs Onny said, some advertisers mounted billboards on walkways, and thus creating discomfort for pedestrians.
Other advertisers also placed advertising billboards at junctions, making it difficult for motorists to see the other side of the road.
She said the guidelines required advertisers to ensure some respectable spacing between billboards on some major roads to ensure sanity.
Mrs Onny said the guidelines also demanded of advertisers to present structural integrity reports (technical details of the degree to which billboards can stand the effect of natural disasters and accidents) to the technical committee.
The committee would have to approve the reports before an advertiser could mount the billboards.
Mrs Onny dispelled the fear of some advertisers that the new guidelines were meant to get them out of business.
Rather, she said, they were meant to improve the standard of their work and prevent the risk associated with the billboards as they sometimes fell down and hurt people in the process.
The President of the AAG, Mr Reginald Laryea, said the guidelines would be incorporated into a draft bill and presented to Parliament by the end of the year.
That, he said, would go a long way to streamline the operations of outdoor advertisers in the country.
The Executive Chairman of the Great Argon Holdings Limited, Mr Torgbor Mensah, said Ghana was doing better than many African countries in terms of outdoor advertising but challenged the country’s advertisers to try to compete with those of the emerging and developed economies.
A member of the technical team, Mr Victor Ameyibor, who chaired the function, urged advertisers to repackage and rebrand their advertising to meet the current demands in the advertising industry.