What Clearcast and the CAA actually check

Broadcast advertising in the UK is pre-approved on behalf of the major broadcasters by Clearcast before it can air, against the broadcast advertising code. Cinema advertising is cleared separately, by the Cinema Advertising Association, which pre-vets every cinema commercial and also issues an age restriction; its FAQ says the stricter of the CAA's and the BBFC's restriction applies.

They are not interchangeable and passing one does not imply the other. A film cleared for television may still attract a cinema rating that restricts its pairing, and a cinema advert is delivered as a different master entirely.

Both clearance processes sit in front of the flight date, each on its own timeline, so a campaign that has to be live in ten days usually cannot include either channel.

Standard television clearance costs nothing, because Clearcast's stakeholders pay for it, so the budget line for clearance is really a line in the schedule. Cinema clearance has a fee and a short turnaround. Both bodies publish their terms, and these are the figures on their own pages.

Clearcast also charges for late or provisional clearance and for edits made to clear, and does not publish those amounts. Ask before you rely on either.

Objective and superlative claims need documentary substantiation. This covers the obvious ones (best, number one, leading) and also comparative claims about competitors and specific quantified assertions about performance. The non-broadcast code, CAP rule 3.7, puts the duty to hold that evidence on marketers. The broadcast code, BCAP rule 3.9, puts it on broadcasters, who get the evidence from the advertiser through Clearcast.

The substantiation has to exist and has to be produceable. A belief that the claim is true, however well founded, is not evidence, and the clearance body will ask for the document rather than assess the plausibility.

The efficient way to handle this is to check at the scripting stage, because catching a flagged claim in the script saves a reshoot of the finished film. AdBuyMCP's pre-check finds superlative claims and names the rule beside each one before anything is commissioned, and it states explicitly that it cannot read a substantiation document and does not assess evidence quality. Where you declare that you hold evidence, both the claim and the declaration stay on the record for the body that actually decides.

Medicines, medical devices, treatments and health claims are governed by their own section of the broadcast code, section 11, and it is the most restrictive category in the codes. It asks for generally accepted scientific evidence and independent expert advice, so an efficacy claim without them will not clear however it is worded.

Adjacent categories carry their own constraints on where an ad may be placed as well as on what it may say, which means a clearance issue in these categories can become a media issue. For cinema the CAA's published policies set audience thresholds: alcohol and gambling ads run only with films whose audience is no more than 25% under-18s, and HFSS food ads with films that have no more than 25% under-16s.

For anything in these categories the sensible sequence is to establish what can be said before writing anything, rather than writing what you want to say and discovering the constraint at clearance.

The CAA gives a cinema ad an age restriction, and the stricter of the CAA's and the BBFC's restriction applies. AdBuyMCP's pre-check flags strong language in cinema copy because it expects that ad to be restricted to 15 and 18 certificate films. That sounds like a creative constraint and is actually a media one: it changes which films you can sit beside, which changes the audience you reach, which can invalidate the venue and film package the plan was built on.

Clear the copy before the media plan is final: if the plan assumed a family-film package and the copy attracts a 15 rating, the plan has to be rebuilt rather than the copy adjusted at the margin.

This is the strongest argument for running the clearance pre-check at the scripting stage rather than at delivery. The information is cheap to act on early and expensive to act on late.