Small Type on Television

Lawyers are probably talking to one another in those unreadable messages that flash on our TV sets and they don’t want us to know what they’re saying.

The ruckus being raised over disclosure notices for television product placements raises a broader question: Who can, or needs to, read all that small type that runs on TV?

The Federal Communications Commission has issued a notification of proposed rulemaking on product placements. Right now the FCC allows the disclosures for such advertising to be run in small print along with the credits at the end of the programs.

Four Percent for Four Seconds

At least one FCC commisson acknowledges that most viewers never see the notices. The agency may require the product disclosures to be similar to those for political sponsors, which must run for four seconds and be displayed in type at least four percent of the height of the television screen. On a typical 51-inch screen, that’s about one inch high.

Four seconds is probably long enough and four percent is probably large enough to read if you’re really looking for the information. It’s like the small print in insurance policies; it’s there to cover legal obligations but not necessarily to be read.

Writers Want ‘Real Time’ Disclosures

The Writers Guild of America, whose members don’t like being pressured to write products into their scripts, have a bolder, unrealistic recommendation for the FCC: Run the product disclosures in "real time" at the bottom of the screen.

"X-Company paid us to show X-brand of cola in the above scene."

Networks, programmers and advertisers flash a lot of other small type on the screen that hardly anyone can read. As we learned from newspaper and magazine ads, small print in advertising is mostly lawyer talk, but it can be important. To see what they’re saying in the TV small print, we’ll have to tape, pause and squint at it.