Regulating Product Placement in the European Union and Canada: Explaining regime change and diversity

Product placement, the purposeful incorporation of commercial content into noncommercial settings, is a controversial form of advertisement. This paper compares the policy processes and diverging regimes for product placement in the European Union and Canada. While the new EU regime is restrictive, the Canadian regime is much more open to the purposeful incorporation of commercial content via product placement.We find that actor-centered approaches do not sufficiently explain the different outcomes, the different policy trajectories and the different policy frames in these two cases. To explain the differences in policy processes and outcomes, we analyze the different policy frames, the different discourses, and actors' positions at the issueexpansion stage of the policy process.We find that regulators in both the EU and Canada have been successful in framing the issue and that, consequently, different policy regimes have emerged.