The national board of the combined Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) has unanimously approved the recently negotiated TV and radio commercials agreements, which must still be ratified by union members via mail and electronic voting next month.
SAG-AFTRA members who are eligible to vote will receive a postcard with ballot instructions explaining how to vote electronically or how to request a paper ballot. This postcard will be mailed to members on or about May 1, 2013. Ratification votes received by the deadline of May 31 at 5 pm PDT will be tabulated that same day.
Member ratification is regarded as a fait accompli. The contracts will result in $238 million in wage increases and other payments for all categories of performers, improvements in cable use fees, higher payments for work on the Internet and new media platforms, and an increase in the late payment fee. The new deal represents a six percent average wage and payment increase.
The agreements came out of formal negotiations between SAG-AFTRA and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA)-American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) Joint Policy Committee (JPC)–those formal talks began on Feb. 14 and concluded on April 6.
The new deal also mandates universal adoption of AD-ID, a provision long sought by the ANA. Ad-ID is the industry coding standard for identifying advertising assets across all media platforms. Use of Ad-ID will provide the necessary identification required by all parties for fair talent compensation. Per the JPC/SAG-AFTRA accord, all commercials produced for television, radio and digital platforms featuring SAG-AFTRA union members, must now use Ad-ID as the sole standard commercial identifier. A grace period through March 31, 2014 will be provided for conversion.
Ad-ID is a web-based system that generates and manages a unique identifying code for each advertising asset and applies that code to all media. Valid Ad-ID codes can only be issued from the Ad-ID system and include all basic information regarding the advertising asset. Ad-ID has developed extensive educational materials posted on http://www.ad-id.org/user-support including webinars, videos and FAQs to help the marketing community make this transition.
“This mandate is a critical step forward for Ad-ID and the advertising industry as a whole,” said Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the ANA, and CEO of Ad-ID. “Full adoption of Ad-ID will enable greater transparency and accountability and eliminate costly errors associated with the inconsistent use of advertising asset identifiers. To ensure consistency with the SAG-AFTRA contract provisions, we strongly recommend that the transition to Ad-ID codes for all television, radio and digital commercial production begin as soon as possible.”
In October 2012, Ad-ID was unanimously endorsed by the boards of directors of the AAAA and ANA as the industry standard for commercial advertising coding.
Making History With “Sugarcane,” Lensing “Nosferatu,” and Sounding Out “A Complete Unknown”
While being nominated for an Academy Award is a high honor, it carries even greater significance for directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie whose Sugarcane (National Geographic) is in the running for the Best Documentary Feature Film Oscar. Gaining recognition from Hollywood--which has a cinematic history of cowboys and Indians fare in which the Indigenous are stereotyped, dehumanized and villainized--means all the more for a documentary chronicling the strength, righteousness and resiliency of real-life Native people as they push back against cultural genocide. Sugarcane is a groundbreaking investigation into an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church in Canada, revealing years of forced separation, assimilation and abuse that Indigenous children endured, part of a cycle of intergenerational trauma. The story began to emerge publicly in 2021 when evidence of unmarked graves was discovered on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Mission near Williams Lake, British Columbia, a boarding school that operated until 1981. What happened there reflects horrific conditions at many such schools--in the U.S. and Canada--with land across North America taken from Indigenous people who were then subjected to physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Their families were torn apart as part of a concerted effort to take them from--and to destroy--their culture. Yet these people persevered as Sugarcane also introduces us to a community that has the resolve to find its roots--translating into a stirring triumph of the human spirit. For Hollywood to embrace this film with an Oscar nod, said NoiseCat, is gratifying given that cinema for a century has had Indigenous people “positioned at the end of a gun barrel in Westerns, which the... Read More