Advertising aimed at children is largely a self-regulated affair. But is that enough to protect children's interests?
Parents need to fear this more than German measles and school exams. It's a jack-in-the-box lying in wait in the living room, ready to pop up just when you are not looking.
Picture this: Mum and Dad, bone tired after another day's grind, flop down on the sofa and allow the Pavlovian reflex to take over – switch on the television. Nine out of 10 times, you are falling headlong into an ad break. Your freefall is broken by junior's screech:
"I want that!" Over and over and over again, the little one screams, jumping up and down the expensive Italian sofas, pointing to the stuff being advertised on the television. Even your tired, droopy eyes can see that it is a snazzy something for kids.
Now that something could be anything from some sugary edible to the latest computer game that will effectively tank Mum and Dad's toy budget for the whole year. The jack-in-the-box gives out a high shriek of happiness and scrunches back into the box. Till, next time, dear Joneses. And the parents, prompted by equal parts of love and exhaustion, guilt and redemption promise the still screaming child that yes, indeed, darling, you will be able to get your hands on it soon.
'How soon?'
'Tomorrow, honey.'
'
Promise?'
'Promise."
All in a day's work really. Yet both parents and children are woefully ill-equipped to deal with it. What are their choices? a) Don't turn on the television. b) Turn it off the minute an ad break breaks (which these days may lead to RSI for your thumb) or c) relocate to Sweden, where a blanket ban on advertising to children younger than 12, has been in effect since 1991.
The EU is toying with the idea of adopting this legislation as well. EU members Greece and Denmark have been considering similar restrictions. (The European toy industry has been up in arms against the Greek Government's ban on TV advertising of toys, which they described as a protectionist trade measure to favour the indigenous Greek toy
industry.)
Advertising aimed at children is no kid stuff. As anyone who has children knows, kids can be tough customers: they are spectacularly sure about what they want, sophisticated in their preferences, deeply aware of what is lacking in their already filled-to-the-brim lives, intelligent and most exasperating of all, finicky.
They are also soft targets.
Smarter juniors
Studies done as early as the 1970s in the USA concluded that children are not able to distinguish advertising content from programming. That finding is as true now, for the media-savvy MySpace Generation, as it was for the Star Wars generation some three decades ago. They are as likely to be taken in by cool superheroes as their parents were – only difference being, thanks to the miracle of merchandising, they will get the T-shirt, the school bag, the snack box and the game, whereas their parents may have only got the comic book. And young children lack the savvy to understand that the superhero is only being used to sell more of whatever line of product he is embossed upon.
It's an old chestnut: children today are growing up faster than they should. They are exposed to much more across a wide spectrum of media:
television, radio, internet and newspapers. And in the age of the nuclear family and more democratic parenting, kids are often the deciding authorities on the variety of consumer choices that a family makes: from which car to drive and which TV show to watch, to what cereal should be eaten at breakfast time and why one brand of deodourant scores over another. Not only that, the amount of money spend that young children have is also increasing. Hence their clout as active consumers, and their growing influence in decision making when it comes to buying products.
The advertising industry has been blamed for stoking the fires of materialism among these youngest consumers. But advertisers also know that once you have a child hooked to your brand, you have a lifelong customer: whether it's a toothpaste or a TV serial, we always retain a special affinity for what we liked in our childhood. The best part of it is that this is a huge and expanding market.
Purveyors of consumerism
Now to the the thorny question: is it right to market to young children?
And who decides what's right and what's not when your target audience is children?
While Sweden is an example of consumers, advertisers and governments uniting to protect children from advertising, many advertisers practise a commendable amount of self regulation as well. Owning its responsibility as a market leader, Hindustan Lever [the Indian arm of the global conglomerate Unilever] also decided not to talk to children below 12 in its communication campaigns. McDonald's, Coca-Cola and Pepsi are specific in not targeting consumers below 12 years. In fact, Coke does not feature children below 12 in any marketing communication.
Thanks to some radical legislation, Sweden's children are being protected from many scourges of consumerism: childhood obesity and lifestyle diseases being some of them.
When it comes to marketing to children, food advertising has been the target of litigation as well as activists' ire. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has published several white papers linking the marketing of food and non-alcoholic beverages to children and rising childhood obesity.
The dilemma is whether all advertising should be banned, or should it be used as a tool to raise literacy about diet, health and nutrition issues.
"As target audiences, young children are most susceptible to influence, be it positive or negative. So the responsibility to discern lies with us, the advertising fraternity, rather than with the target audience itself," says Mayura Sandeep, a Dubai-based copywriter with Ikon Advertising and Marketing.
"I don't see much of unethical advertising for children happening in the UAE, fortunately. On the other hand, considering advertising as a powerful medium of influence, it can be a strategic tool to advocate social responsibility and ethics to young children; and in this role, advertising has a lot to explore in the region," adds Sandeep.
Initiating change
It might be utopian to expect mainstream advertising to be an agent of social change, but it is happening. Dubai-based advertising professional Sheldon Serrao cites the instance of the Lifebuoy soap campaign. Its Hindi tagline: "Only those who do not fear for their own safety can change the world," inspired children in rural India into cleaning up their surroundings. Lifebuoy soap is owned by Hindustan Lever, a Unilever subsidiary, which is also India's largest advertiser and hence has a significant impact on advertising in that country.
Lifebuoy created a campaign to teach children the importance of handwashing, thereby cutting down on the risk of spreading diarrhoeal diseases in rural India. Hindustan Lever's health officers visit village schools to teach children about germs and encourage the school to put on a show for parents and the community, acting out sketches on the importance of handwashing with soap. Mothers of young children are invited to attend a health education session, and schoolchildren, parents and other villagers are recruited as volunteers to start health clubs that organise community events.
"In fact, advertisements for products like health drinks, cereals and children's soaps are spot on regarding values and principles," says Serrao. "However, if elements like violence and disrespect can be kept out of advertising for children, I think we're on safe ground."
Vigilant advertising watchdogs elsewhere have ensured that advertisers tread carefully when it comes to communicating with children. The Indian ad fraternity's own Advertising Standard Council of India (ASCI) recently took Cadbury's and Heinz to task for making exaggerated claims in their commercials about their beverages.
Who bells the cat?
However, in many Asian countries, including the UAE, advertising ethics are entirely self-regulated. As one advertising professional says, "In the absence of any guidelines, most of the time it's a joint call taken by the agency and the client to decide what's acceptable when we are marketing to children."
In the region, the profession follows an Advertising and Marketing Code laid down by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), a group comprising multinational businesses. Last year, ICC issued guidelines on responsible marketing for food and beverage companies.
The ICC's ethics code outlines a series of global principles that contain both best practices and restrictions for marketing communications directed at children. Article 14 of the general ICC Code of Advertising Practice lays down basic rules governing advertising and children. It asks advertisers to refrain from campaigns that exploit the inexperience of children, undermine parental authority or appeal to children to persuade their parents.
To encourage healthier choices among children, a series of "guideposts" have been created for food and beverage marketers. They are asked to show reasonable consumption in their advertising, with reasonable portion sizes.
The ICC code tackles not just the message, but also the mode – the code covers not just traditional advertising, but also direct marketing, promotions, internet advertising and the other newer forms of marketing communication such as fantasy and animation.
Marketing should not lead a child to believe a product will make him or her more popular, smarter or more successful in school or in sports. Sales promotions must present the conditions of a premium offer or contest in a language a child can understand, spelling out the products that must be purchased to receive the offer, the terms of entry, the prizes and the chances of winning.
ICC's codes of practice have in the past been widely used around the world by self-regulatory organisations in the advertising business as the basis for their own rules. However, critics argue that self-regulation just doesn't have enough teeth to ensure that advertisers do what's ethical and moral, and simply avoid communicating with children – choosing to communicate instead, with their parents or adult caregivers.
Bodies such as the WHO believe that it's only legislation and active thrust from the government that will get advertisers to toe the line.
It's a lesson learned from the campaign to get infant food manufacturers to clearly state on the pack that breast milk is best for a baby. Had it been left to the manufacturers alone to self regulate, the packaging may never have promoted breastfeeding.
Hooked ... line and sinker
Yet, the world's largest fast food, snacks and cola companies, who between them make up the heftiest chunk of products consumed by children, publicly state they do not target young consumers. These are internal guidelines followed by companies, hence difficult to monitor.
A case in point being the new launch of cola commercial. The TVC (television commercial) shows a group of Indian boys approach a tailor shop to get themselves measured out for an Indian cricket team uniform.
One of the boys tells the old tailor to stretch the shirt length to 24 inches instead of his size of 20. The old man obliges and measures another boy's chest. "33 inches," informs the tailor. But the boy asks the tailor to make it 40. This gets repeated with all the measurements.
When done, the tailor asks the boys when they would like their clothes delivered. Pat comes the response, "Four years from now. We are bringing home the next World Cup!"
While the appeal of cricket cuts across all demographics in India, this TVC will particularly appeal to tweens. The language and situation, the protagonists – urban streetsmart tweens who are funny and cool, and cola drinkers to boot, will doubtless capture the imagination of younger consumers. While the boys may be over 12, they are definitely not over 18. There is no watchdog to decide if the advertising code has been breached or not in this particular instance.
But as another self-regulatory body, the European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) argues on its website: "It is not the business of advertising self-regulation to decide whether or not advertising should be addressed to children. Its function is to regulate advertisement content and since what is forbidden cannot, by definition, be regulated, it is based on two assumptions: first, that some advertising is addressed to children and second, that children are likely to see a great deal of advertising, whether addressed to them or not."
So if not the self-regulatory bodies, who then decides what (if any) should be the content of marketing aimed at children? "It's simple. The brief is issued by the client. The creative is done by the ad agency.
And the client is the final authority to reject or approve the ad. The responsibility lies totally with the client," says Kandarp Baxi, account director with The Chase, a Dubai-based advertising agency, and a father of two.
Parents and advertisers know that children are avid consumers of advertising – and that consumption isn't restricted just to products and services aimed at them. But psychologists. and counsellors have shown that this indiscriminate consumption is not in the child's best interests.
Baxi is in favour of external regulations. "Recently, we researched a product with some schoolchildren in the age groups 8 to 12 and 13 to 16.
It was a revelation to see how responsible they were in articulating their preferences, opinions and feelings. They could put adults to shame. The argument quite often [used by the advertising fraternity] is that today's kids can teach a lot to the older generation. However, that does not give the ad agency or the client carte blanche."
Even though they seem media savvy, children do not have the same knowledge and maturity of judgment as an adult, says Baxi. No marketing content should exploit a child's sense of innocence about the world, his sense of loyalty, or encourage him to copy bad examples.
"In a younger age group, where a child is not able to decipher what is right or wrong, it's the collective responsibility shared by the client, ad agency and the parents or society to protect children. While there are proper guidelines in place for products related to health and nutrition, they need to be applied across the whole domain of marketing targeted to children."
What Baxi finds particularly unconscionable is undue hype – the kind which misleads the audience. "Of course, this is a basic ethic of advertising that applies across age groups, but when it comes to children, we must be especially careful.
"Quite often many of us in advertising are self indulgent. We feel that our creative work is what defines effective advertising. That is a fundamental mistake. What we should be looking at is how to engage a child in a meaningful way through the product or service we are trying to sell. Now that could be through a fun approach or a mental exercise or a game or anything stimulating. And at the same time, my thought must be in creating advertising that can involve parents as well."
Do parents have a say?
Baxi does not absolve parents of their responsibility. "Parents need to set an example when it comes to establishing boundaries. These are limits that will only benefit a child even as an adult."
Advertising to children is an emotionally charged issue, and one that is an inevitable part of childhood today. It might sound impractical to shield children from all advertising content, and even an extreme form of denial. The trick is for parents, educators and marketers to teach children how to be discriminating in what they consume. If self-regulation is not able to do so, education can step in to fill the gaps.
The Big Issues in Marketing to Children
(Excerpts from the EASA guidelines)
Avoiding harm to children
Advertisements likely to be seen by children should contain nothing which might realistically be copied and result in harm to them. Safety in the home is particularly important and advertisements should also avoid encouraging children to indulge in potentially dangerous activities, enter strange or lonely places or talk to strangers.
Similarly, advertisements should contain nothing which might encourage children to neglect basic principles of health and safety. They should, obviously, never be shown using inappropriate or potentially dangerous products. Objects which might be safe in children's hands if used properly or under adult supervision, should not be shown being used in ways which might be dangerous, or by children too young to handle them safely. In each case, the degree of potential harm needs to be taken into account and behaviour which could have really serious consequences should not be shown, even if the likelihood of children copying it is not great.
Advertisements addressed to children
Descriptions and portrayals immediately recognisable by adults as exaggeration or hyperbole are likely to be taken more literally by children, so advertisements addressed to children should avoid anything which might lead them to suppose that the product advertised is bigger or better than it really is, or result in disappointment. If additional accessories are required, or an advertised product is suitable only for children above a certain age, this should be made clear.
Where prices are included, they should not be made to seem trivial by the use of qualifications such as 'only' or 'just' and, especially in the case of expensive products, advertisements should not suggest that children or their families can easily afford them. Advertisements addressed to children should not employ 'hard sell' techniques, putting children under pressure to buy or encouraging them to ask their parents or others to do so. There should be no suggestion that children will be superior to others if they own the advertised product, or inferior if they do not, or that possession of a product is essential to peer-group acceptance.
Depicting children in advertisements
Many people take exception to what they regard as the exploitation of children in advertisements. For this reason, the use of children to present products or services which are of little or no natural interest to them, to give formalised testimony or to make comments which have obviously been put into their mouths by advertisers, is prohibited in some countries and in any case, best avoided.
It is also important, especially in the light of public concern about such issues as child-abuse ... for advertisers to avoid showing inappropriate images of children. In particular, portrayals of children which parody adult sexuality are not acceptable and great care and discretion is needed.
