AUDIOVISUAL: ADVERTISING SCANDAL ROCKS GERMAN TV BROADCASTING.

Product placement - the prominent featuring of branded products in television programmes or films - is possible only to a limited extent on ARD and ZDF, the two biggest public stations in Germany. But reports in recent weeks suggest that products and brands featured on many German soap operas often appear there as a result of large sums of money changing hands, a practice that is entirely illegal. For example, the production company Bavaria, which works closely with ARD, is said to have received euro 1.5 million over the last three years for the prominent use of branded products in its programmes.

According to Burkhard Renner, a Cologne-based lawyer specialising in the media, covert advertising is a common means of funding for most types of media. But the public stations tend to come in for harsher criticism, primarily because they are perceived as educators. There is a fine line between what is allowed (the use of products or objects "because the plot calls for it", according to the public stations' terms of reference) and what is not (i.e. covert advertising).

The commercial stations have, in any case, seized upon the revelations to reopen the debate on the funding of their public rivals. The head of RTL, Gerhard Zeiler, and his counterpart from the subscriber-only channel Premiere, Georg Kofler, are calling for the end of ARD and ZDF's commercial activities, as they believe they should depend solely on the licence fee system. Hubertus Meyer-Burckhardt from the...