Further Complicated: Advertising, Children and Television

Michael Hedges - March 19, 2007

Childhood obesity will be a significant issue for the European Commission in the coming year as well as among many national governments. The picture is painful and troubling. The narrative blames advertising and television.

National health services in Western European countries report a bloating of over-weight children. Television and advertising are the culprits. Children as young as 3 years see junk food ads on TV and “pester” their parents until they get what they want. Television and advertising continue to be targets of opportunity for critics of every social phenomenon. 

Advertisers, naturally, want self-regulation. Commercial television wants no regulation. Consumer groups want total bans. Newspapers want to hobble television. Audiences want great (read: not boring) TV. Politicians want happiness (read: votes).

UK media regulator OFCOM has set in place new rules, effective in September, banning junk food ads from television targeted to children under 16 years. According to the narrative, kids in the UK are fat and unhealthy because of the overwhelming persuasion of advertising on television.

The television: bad narrative satisfies anxieties over entertainment, popular culture, socialization, education, all with a serious stroke of Calvinism (read: no singing, no dancing, back to work). Edward R. Murrow’s hopeful “this medium can teach” vision merged with Newton Minnow’s “vast wasteland” fear. And these were expressed when television was young.

Transpiring in television’s second and now third generation is the probatimthat “this medium can sell.” Television broadcasters eclipsed newspaper publishers as the sales and marketing tool of choice. If your product is not on television it’s just not on.

Sellers of products, services and ideas found an unpleasant response/cost threshold. Television delivers huge audiences but conversion to sales (tangible or otherwise) continues to fall – in mature media markets. During times of economic buoyancy this isn’t a problem. Branding and “soft-advertising” rises. In developing media markets – Eastern Europe to Russia, to India and China – the release of pent-up demands, consumer and social, mixed with vastly more television channels releases the urge to spend.

The contrast in attitudes toward advertising and television between mature media markets – Western Europe and North America – and those in developing media markets could not be starker. Critics are great in the former and few in the later. This does not mean that Polish mother and fathers love their children less than British or Swedes. It does mean that political and social voices are raised on less complicated, more basic issues.

The advertising: bad narrative runs along similar, though significantly deeper lines. Mixing state socialism and the aforementioned dose of Calvinism, social and political critics of advertising see an evil force cleverly devising schemes to take people’s money for things they do not need or even want. In Europe, not far from the surface advertising anxiety is tinged with memories of state propaganda machines using every possible medium and media trick to bend minds and break hearts.

Sweden instituted in 1991 a broad ban on television ads directed toward children under 12 years. Swedish Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have been forceful in energizing the European Commission (EC) to construct tougher advertising rules within the Audiovisual Media Services (AVMS) Directive. Norway, not an EU member, followed suit.

The issue is considered closed in Sweden. There have been no rigorous studies investigating subsequent effects on children, television and advertising, according to Henri Pagot of the Swedish Advertising Association and Swedish media scientist Erling Bjurström. One result, according to Pagot, is virtually no advertising directed toward children, less than 1% of all television ad spending in Sweden.

Bjurström wrote in 1994 for the Swedish Consumer Agency - as the Swedish rules took effect - a highly illuminating and highly readable survey of advertising effects on children. Rather than validating the simple advertising: bad, television: bad narratives he found reality far more complicated. Children watch television and, therefore, see advertising aimed at adults. On the question of effects of television advertising on children “science has not arrived at a unanimous answer.”

He reports that television advertising has, indeed, influence on children “in special circumstances.”  Influence, he says, is not necessarily a call to action. “Children of parents with low socio-economic status and educational level are both exposed to more TV advertising and develop a lower degree of ‘nutritional awareness’ than other children. So in this case, it is conceivable that TV advertising confirms or reinforcesattitudes to and knowledge of ‘nutritional matters’ that exists in the environment in which the children are living.”

Some children as young as 3 or 4 years know the difference between a TV ad and a TV program. Most between 6 and 8 years see the difference and “it is only around or after the age of 12 that we can be more certain that most children have developed a more complete understanding of the purpose or objective of advertising.”

Today Bjurström offers the opinion that Sweden’s ad restrictions have not been “so successful, mainly because a lot of TV stations, located outside Sweden, mediate ads to Swedish children.”

The Swedish National Center for Child Obesity reported in February the first cases of Type-2 adult-onset diabetes in children under 5 years. Type-2 diabetes is related to obesity. Sweden’s first reported cases of Type-2 diabetes in teenagers were reported two years ago.

Cross-border television and advertising – more and more a reality with satellite and internet TV – faces continual debate as politicians and their forces sort out the European Commission’s new AVMS. While controversial on many issues, the AVMS Directive has, so far, enshrined the “country of origin” principle that is included in virtually every EC Directive touching commerce and competition. The current AVMS draft, now under debate by the European Parliament, relaxes advertising quantity rules and allows tacit approval for product placement.

It’s a delicate bit of negotiation as “country of origin” preserves national jurisdiction over many, often sensitive, rules. Swedish MEP Jerker Stattin wants to add language that “broadcasters need to take into consideration the national values in the member states,” moving in the direction of tougher pan-European rules.

Television companies taking advantage of “country of origin” organizing legally in one country and broadcasting in others include Viasat, owned by Modern Times Group, and SBS Broadcasting. Both are legally domiciled in the UK and operate TV channels in a number of countries, including Sweden where Viasat operates TV3 and SBS operates Kanal 5. New, more strict UK ad rules will impact both companies, which based in the UK before Sweden allowed any television broadcasting other than state TV.

In North America the Canadian province of Quebec banned television advertising to children more than 25 years ago. From across their border, US television channels pound out ads for everything.

Other self-interests are apparent in the debate. Newspaper publishers universally support ad bans, for any reason, on television. The newspaper lobby has been successful in preventing most advertising-related restrictions from migrating back to the printed page. Looking forward, ad restrictions on the internet, replacing TV as the medium of choice for young and old, are extremely rare…so far.