Türkiye's new advertising rules take effect on August 1
Amendments to the Commercial Advertising and Unfair Commercial Practices Regulation take effect in Türkiye on August 1, 2026. From that date, ads featuring AI-generated characters must say so, influencer posts must carry an advertisement label, discount claims must reference the lowest price of the previous ten days, and environmental claims must be documented.
The countdown to the regulation has started
The Ministry of Trade's amendments to the Commercial Advertising and Unfair Commercial Practices Regulation were published in the Official Gazette dated July 1, 2026, issue 33297, and take effect on August 1, 2026. The Ministry frames the purpose as strengthening consumer protection against deceptive advertising and commercial practices. With days left before the deadline, the industry issued its own reminder: Hakan Çevikoğlu, chairman of the Electronic Commerce Operators Association, said the new practices go live on August 1 and cover a wide area, from digital marketing to discount sales.
AI, influencers, discounts and environmental claims
There are two separate rules on the AI side. If an advertisement features digital characters created with AI technologies that cannot be distinguished from a real person, this must be stated clearly, understandably and distinguishably. Using an AI-generated digital copy of a real person in a way that suggests they personally experienced or recommended a product or service is banned.
For social media creators the labelling requirement is now explicit: promotions made in return for payment, free products, discounts or any other benefit must clearly state that the post is an advertisement. In targeted advertising, advertisers may continue these practices provided that the criteria used and the way those criteria can be changed are made available to the consumer; targeted advertising based on profiling of children is prohibited.
In discount advertising, price displays may reference the lowest price of the ten days before the discount begins, while for perishable goods the previous price applies; conditional campaigns also fall under discount advertising rules. Environmental claims such as environmentally friendly cannot be used as general statements without explanation, and certificates must come from authorized bodies. The response time for published consumer complaints drops from 72 hours to 48 hours, and advertising bans covering fortune telling, illegal betting and games of chance are broadened.
As production speeds up, disclosure duties grow
The cost and the time it takes to produce an ad have fallen sharply over the past two years: a brand can now put an AI-generated face, voice or scene on air in hours rather than days. The new rules do not ban that speed, they attach a transparency condition to it. The same logic applies to creators: whether a piece of content is commercial is no longer left to the publisher's discretion, the viewer has to be able to tell.
The ten-day reference rule on discounts affects pricing and campaign calendars directly. Setups that raise a price before a campaign and present the result as a discount lose their meaning against that reference. None of this is limited to a single channel; wherever the advertisement runs, the same principles apply.
What it means for businesses in Türkiye
This regulation concerns every business advertising in Türkiye, and there are only a few days left. A short checklist helps. First, audit the ad assets you have live: without an inventory of which images, videos or voiceovers used AI, you cannot meet the disclosure duty. Second, make the disclosure a standard step of the production flow rather than something added at the end.
Third, add the labelling requirement to your influencer briefs and contract templates, and keep a pre-publication review step. Fourth, on the e-commerce side, keep a record of price history: the ten-day lowest price reference can only be calculated correctly if you have the underlying data. Fifth, tie environmental claims on product pages to documentation, because general statements left unexplained create risk. Finally, align your targeted advertising notice with your privacy and cookie texts so it works alongside the explicit consent flow required under Türkiye's data protection law.
The UNALSOFT take
Our approach is this: compliance is a production problem solved before publication, not a legal note added afterwards. In the AI-assisted ad content we produce, which element is synthetic is recorded in the project file, and the disclosure is placed during the edit rather than patched on later. That is the flow we run in our AI ad films service: keeping production speed while making sure the viewer knows what they are watching. Rules will keep changing; what absorbs the change is not the content itself but the system behind it.
A few days left until August 1.
Let's review your live ads and your discount setup together.