Public-Service Ads Rare on Turkmen TV

16-Nov-09

A three-day training workshop has highlighted the importance of public-service advertising, still rare in Turkmenistan.

The event, held in the Turkmen capital Ashgabat on November 5-7, was attended by state healthcare and education workers, representatives of the official youth and women’s organisations, and journalists writing for the state-run media.

Public-service broadcasts and notices are rare in Turkmenistan’s media, which are run and tightly controlled by government. The only exception is TV ads on gas appliance safety in the home.

National Breastfeeding Week, which was supported by the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF, is a good example.

“There were no TV or radio ads on the subject,” recalls a journalist working for state-run TV, “but there was some coverage in TV news, and about one million mobile phone users received a message about the importance of breast milk and the newly adopted law on breastfeeding”.

The news coverage, he added, was probably only because of the UN’s involvement.

A representative of a non-government organisation in Ashgabat said he had asked state TV to help help him to produce an advert to be shown on World AIDS Day on December 1, but they turned him down, saying special permission would be needed from the health ministry.

“It is very difficult for a non-government organisation to place an advert for nothing,” the TV journalist said.

Members of groups like the Society for the Blind, the Society for the Deaf and the Association of Retired Teachers say they never approach TV or radio to air material on their behalf because they doubt anyone would agree to do so.

“Although we have heard that western countries have adverts of this kind which draw the public’s attention to the problems facing of blind people and educate them to be tolerant and kind towards us, we never dare contact them [broadcast media],” said one staff member at the Society for the Blind.

TV and radio prefer to run commercial ads that bring in revenue, rather than raise concerns about narcotics use, elderly people or the disabled.

NBCentralAsia commentators say that with the legislative framework in place, requiring media outlets to devote a certain amount of time to public-service adverts, producers and advertisers would have an incentive to take part in generating this kind of material.

(NBCentralAsia is an IWPR-funded project to create a multilingual news analysis and comment service for Central Asia, drawing on the expertise of a broad range of political observers across the region. The project ran from August 2006 to September 2007, covering all five regional states. With new funding, the service has resumed, covering Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.)