Legal issues

Today in Russia we have the one basic law which controlls the advertisement activity throughout the country - the Federal law  "About the advertisement"  form 13.03.2006 № FZ-38. We have analyzed this law and also took a consultation with the student of School of Law of SPbU. The only one article which is related to the question about the possible limits of using the provocative campaign is Article №5 "The general requirements for advertising" which contains the next paragraph:

"It is not allowed to use in advertisement swear words, obscene of offensive images, comparisons and expressions, including those based on a sex, race, nationality , profession and social category..." (Paragraph 6, Article 5). Predicting the questions about our company's provocative campaign we can state that one of existing posters or advertisement could be seen as a  contradiction to Russian Federal legislation. We mean using immigrant images. We are not going to use this advertisement because it is forbidden by the Federal legislation and Russians simply dislike the immigrats from the Southern countries. Also there is only one law precedent here in Russia which forbidens the gay minority promotion, it is related to the territory of St-Petersburg. We can predict that such law will be passed on the federal level but it doesn't matter for us because we are not going to use gay images because In Russia the gay minorities are treated with the high degree of prejudice. Other statements of our advertisement campaign don't contradict to the existing legislation. 

In any case the Article 38 is it stated that "Persons whose rights and and rights are violated by an inproper distribution of the advertising are able to appeal in the prescrided manner to the court, including claims for damages, lost profits, compensation for harm to hte health of individuals and (or) property, compensation for moral damages..." So if someone thinks that this provocative campaign hurts its moral feeling he or she are able to defend their views in the court (no company is guaranteed  from such situation). But we are pretty self-confident to state that advertisement we are going to use will not give rise to such situations but even if it does as we were told by the lawyers it is practically impossible to prove the non-pecuniary damage in Russia and moreover to get the moral compensation. We don't know the precedents like that in the country.

We also want to present you some provocative advertisement  of other companies which were very successful and no one faced any problems which provocative contants and were met by the public quite friendly. 

Concept club

"Rich" juice

J'adore Dior

"Daria" damplings

So we can state that American Apperel is going to use its basic promotion campaign exept for the the ones that contradict to the Federal or local legislation.