Tighter controls on advertising to children will be high on the European agenda when Sweden takes over the EU presidency on January 1st. The Swedes have some of the strictest controls in Europe on children and advertising. The cornerstone of their legislation is a ban on all television advertisements aimed at children under 12. And that doesn't just cover the obvious, such as toys; it includes foods, sweets, drinks - indeed any product that might appeal to pre-teens. It's a scenario that is nearly impossible to imagine in Ireland, particularly in the frenzied run-up to Christmas. At certain times during the day every second television advertisement is for the latest high-priced toy, sugary snack or brand of soft drink.
The Euro-wide ban on all tobacco advertising is seen by the advertising industry as just the first step in a harmonisation of regulations that will eventually extend to the advertising of cars, alcohol and to children. In Ireland, as is the case in most European countries, advertising is a mostly self-regulated industry whereby advertisers and advertising agencies formulate a code of conduct which is usually based on the "legal, decent and truthful" benchmark.
The mood in several European countries is to tighten up children-and-advertising guidelines. In Denmark, the state broadcaster TV2 has agreed with the government that no advertisement aimed at children can be broadcast within one and a half minutes of a children's programme. In Belgium it is five minutes on either side. In Greece all toy advertising is banned on TV before 10 p.m. and Norway, the Netherlands and Austria all have internal restrictions to varying degrees. In Ireland the code, which is overseen by the Advertising Standards Authority, deals with issues relating to truth and accuracy as well some of the broader issuers relating to pester power.
Children, it states, "should not be made to feel inferior or unpopular for not buying the advertised product" and they should not be encouraged "to make a nuisance of themselves to parents or others with the aim of persuading them to buy the advertised product". The section that deals with advertisements addressed to children seems particularly relevant when put against toy advertising. Advertisements, the code states, should make it easy for children to judge the actual size, characteristics and performance of any product advertised; and "should not exaggerate what is attainable by an ordinary child using the product". "Our code is looked on as a model for other countries to follow," says Steven Shanahan, chief executive of the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland (IAPI). "Sweden's ban is unlikely to be implemented Eurowide for the simple reason that it's been shown not to work." Speaking last month at a conference organised by the British Advertising Association, Erling Bjurstrom, who has advised the Swedish government on advertising legislation, said the ban did not work in practice. This is because Swedish children, like their Irish counterparts, have access to stations other than domestic ones. Apart from the wide range of satellite stations available he pointed to the example of TV3, a Swedish company that takes advantage of a legal loophole by broadcasting by satellite from the UK. By basing itself in London, it comes under Independent Television Commission rules, not those of the Swedish TV regulators. According to the World Federation of Advertisers, research has shown that a Swedish child sees the same amount of advertising as any other European child because TV stations still need advertising revenue and the breaks in children's programmes are crammed with adult advertisements. At the same conference Els de Bens, a professor at the University of Ghent in Belgium, said product placement and merchandising, where children are not always aware they are being sold to, were more damaging than TV commercials.
Shanahan echoes the point, saying that children as young as three or four are able to differentiate between advertising on television and TV programmes. "Even very young children are smart enough to know that ads are trying to sell them something," he says, "so it is better to have blocks of advertising that can be clearly regulated." There is very little research on Irish pre-teen attitudes to advertising, but in 1999 IAPI commissioned "Youthscape", a wide-ranging research study on young people between the ages of 12 to 18 which included their attitude to marketing and advertising. It found that by the age of 13, teenagers are acutely brand-conscious and that the typical Irish teenager loves hanging around shopping centres, mostly agrees with his or her parents' values, drinks Coke, wears Nike and has at least £20 per week to spend - enough pocket money to make teenagers valuable targets for marketing departments. A study this year conducted in the UK by the Chartered Institute of Marketing found that 36 per cent of adult consumers there believe that advertising is the biggest influence on children, with only 17 per cent believing parents have the most power. Children's television is the most commercially focused area in broadcasting. The real money for the programme-makers is not in selling the programmes to stations, but in selling merchandising to the kiddie audience. The list is endless - but think of the Teletubbies, the Muppets Barney, the Tweenies and this year's toddler must-have, Bear in the Big Blue House. In the context of this intensely commercial environment it is easy to see how Sweden will have difficulty persuading its European partners to adopt the ban on children's advertising as an antidote to pester power
Shanahan admits that our advertising code is not perfect and that one area it could tackle is the frequency of toy advertising on television. But there are other areas relating to children that could also be tightened - not just on the subject of advertisements aimed at children, but also how children are used in advertising.
This year the National Lottery is running a Christmassy TV ad for its Hampers and Roses scratchcard. Now in its third year, the ad features a little girl of about five years old in a festive setting complete with a Christmas tree, the usual decorations and boxes of sweets. So far, so festive. But behind all the contrived cuteness is an ad that uses a child to promote a gambling product.
Children are prohibited by law from purchasing scratchcards so the child is advertising something that she could not even buy. According to Ray Bates, director of the National Lottery, the ad is designed to look festive and in its three years on television no one has complained about it. He also says that the ad has been passed by the Advertising Standards Authority - and he is correct when he says that it does not contravene the authority's written code. Even if Sweden is unsuccessful in its attempt to harmonise legislation governing children and advertising throughout Europe, its presidency of the EU should at least make the advertising industry more conscious of the spirit as well as the letter of the codes it develops. It should also raise the awareness of the general public as to the impact and effect of advertising on young consumers - who are not so media savvy that they can protect themselves from the barrage of marketing messages in the breaks between their favourite cartoons.
