Open normen in de reclame

Advertising is important, not only from the perspective of the advertiser, but also because it plays a substantial part in everyday life. Public, media, publicity agencies and advertisers however, all judge these messages from different points of view. In our kind of society advertising is inevitable. Not only for the sake of advertisers and the branches of trade which depend on or relate to the advertisement business, but also for the sake of the receivers of the advertisements - whether they are adressed or not - it is of importance that advertising is not just considered as an irritating factor, or worse. Therefore the Reclame Code Commissie (RCC) and the matching College van Beroep (CvB) were installed, within the Stichting Reclame Code (SRC), by various organisations. These commissions administer a private form of justice, based on their own regulations (the Dutch Code of Advertising Practice). Besides this form of selfregulation, there are of course also the judgements of the regular courts of law.It seemed usefull to investigate the way these institutions - RCC/CvB and the judge - which are authoritative on advertising regulations, deal with open norms. In this thesis the judgements of RCC/CvB and courts in the period from 1982 until 2000 are categorised and analysed.