ACCC Black Friday sweep: match the clip's end date to the sale end

If your Black Friday clip says "ends Monday", the sale has to end Monday. The ACCC's Black Friday sweeps, as the regulator describes them, focus on misleading limited-time claims, countdown timers that do not match the real end of the sale, and misleading site-wide or store-wide claims. The safest video workflow is to generate the end-date text from the same value that ends the sale, and to retire the clip when the sale is over.

What the regulator said (summary read 2026-10-05)

Both ACCC pages returned an access block to our automated fetch, so the table is limited to what the regulator's media release summaries reported. Read the releases yourself before relying on this, and note that Australian rules apply to Australian consumers. This is not legal advice.

Do not bake a live countdown into an MP4

A rendered MP4 cannot count down. Any "2 days left" burned into it is wrong tomorrow. Two safer patterns work with video captions: burn a fixed end time ("Ends Mon 30 Nov, 23:59") that stays true for the life of the clip, or burn a countdown frame per day and publish one clip per day. A caption job is $0.20 for a clip up to 60 seconds.

The script derives the text from one SALE_END value and puts the same value in the idempotency key. If marketing extends the sale, change the constant and re-run on the clean master: the new key creates a new job instead of returning the old one.

import json, os, urllib.request
from datetime import datetime

SALE_END = datetime(2026, 11, 30, 23, 59)  # the one source of truth
text = "Ends " + SALE_END.strftime("%a %d %b, %H:%M")
body = {"video_url": "https://example.com/master.mp4",
        "cues": [{"text": text, "start": 0.5, "end": 4.0}]}
req = urllib.request.Request(
    "https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions", json.dumps(body).encode(),
    {"Authorization": "Bearer " + os.environ["SUME_API_KEY"],
     "Content-Type": "application/json",
     "Idempotency-Key": "bfcm26-end-" + SALE_END.strftime("%Y%m%d%H%M")})
print(text, json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(req)).get("request_id"))

Retire the clip when the offer ends

The enforcement item in the table is about discounts that continued after the advertised end. That is an operations problem as much as a creative one. Keep a list of every published clip with its end time and take each one down on schedule. Keep the clean master with no burned text so a new end date means one new caption job, not a new edit.

Limits

Site-wide wording ("everything 50% off") is a different claim from timing and needs its own check against your actual catalog. A clip can be accurate when published and wrong later. Review at publish time and again at the moment the sale ends.