At the Commercial Radio Conference, Queensland Premier, Peter Beattie, has delivered good news to the radio industry about compulsory tags on financial services ads. They will be shortened.

The tags, which take up 17 seconds of a radio ad, were introduced in state legislations last year to make loan products more transparent, but have resulted in most of this type of advertising being taken off radio.

Beattie says: “Even politicians can see how much damage this has done and how it has killed these types of ads for radio.”

He has told the conference that premiers are close to reaching agreement on a new requirement which will be less onerous on radio advertising.