Fat Manga Babies

Only a few years ago, advertising was accused of making children too thin. It seems that it has now overcompensated.

Last week Cadbury had a PR disaster over their promotion linking chocolate to sports goods for schools. Having failed to ban advertising to children altogether, Labour MP Debra Shipley has tabled a bill to outlaw food and drink advertising aimed at the under-fives. Last year the Archbishop of Canterbury dared to argue that advertising to children was akin to sexual abuse - and this was at a time that the Catholic church in America was in genuine trouble over literal, actual child molestation.

James Twitchell writes about the ‘dumb ox’ theory of adult consumers, which is that smart advertisers trick unthinking herds of consumers into buying stuff they don’t really want. It’s not really true, but it suits advertisers because it makes them feel clever; it suits some consumers because it gives them a license and excuse for their behaviour. Part of the complicity is that people will watch and respond to advertising whilst denying its effect so long as the adverting keeps its promise to entertain, suggest and take the blame from time to time. Adults who buy in too wholeheartedly to this model of consumerism infantilise themselves and end up blaming advertisers for their own weak skills in parenting.

Things are much more complex when children are involved in watching adverts however, since they are supposedly slow to understand the motivations, mendacity and nuances of advertising. The 21st century is pretty confused about what children actually are. In the 19th Century and even later, Catholics believed that they were tainted with original sin, whilst Protestants believed that they were morally no different from animals until they were indoctrinated into the church. Freud complicated matters by discussing infant sexuality at the beginning of a century that managed to extended childhood by several years and more or less invented the teenager. Today adults treat children as if they were characters from a Manga cartoon – as possessing extraordinary wisdom and insight and therefore as a source of valuable opinion, as unbelievably vulnerable and therefore to be protected from every imaginable influence or harm, and as very powerful and therefore to be feared.

Manga children get very brand-savvy very quickly and very young. According to Martin Lindstrom, author of Brandchild:

The average British, Australian or American child will be exposed to 20,000-40,000 ads a year; American children spend 60 per cent more time in front of the TV screen each year than they do at school. In the US, four- to 12-year-olds spent about £35 billion in 2001, but influenced 60 per cent of their parents' brand purchases - overall, their total global purchasing influence adds up to an unimaginable $188 trillion

If I disagree with Martin Lindstrom on any significant point, it is his idea that children are ‘constantly searching for meaning’. That’s a predicament that is not generally shared by people born after, say, 1977. They are constantly creating meaning, not searching for it. The trouble for brands in the 21st century is that they can’t hope to clumsily and temporarily plug a momentary absence of meaning in consumers’ lives, but that they must be interesting and useful to people who are creating their own meaning.

Attempting to protect children from advertising is impossible and unnecessary, though it is responsible parenting to spend time with young children why companies advertise and whether or when you should believe them. I don’t envy parents who have to call junk food into question in the same ad break that they have to insist on the validity and importance of the Green Cross Code. So long as children watch adverts as part of a family they will quickly learn to interpret advertising for what it is. Mark Ritson's work at London Business School has shown in several studies that people watching adverts together comment on, ridicule and undermine adverts even as they admire and enjoy them.

Imagine a version of King Cnut’s story where he proves that he can’t control the tide but it doesn't matter because everyone can swim like a seal. It is fanciful to imagine that today’s children only receive adverts that are intended for them during “children’s hour” on TV or that they could be protected from them with a ban. Adverts and children are everywhere almost all the time. Children see adverts everywhere. They see adverts and junk e-mail that I would prefer to be shielded from on the Internet.
Even if it were possible, ‘protecting’ children from advertising would, just as would shielding them from any other part of culture, only make them less prepared and capable to critically evaluate it when they are finally permitted to experience it.

Advertising, along with bad parenting and lack of general nutritional knowledge among adults, may be helping to cause obesity in children. Rather than ban adverts for bad products, it would be better to advertise apples.