Why ads are not to blame for your kids’ life choices

IF laws announced by the health department recently are promulgated by parliament, it will become illegal to target children with advertising for non-nutritional food.

This will affect not only fast-food outlets such as McDonald’s and Wimpy but also a whole range of snacks and other foodstuffs with high sugar and fat content.

All of which will make advertising look even more like the villain it is already perceived to be, particularly by parents with young kids.

But is it enough to ban advertising? Is advertising really such an evil influence? Or is there something else that is making our kids fat, unhealthy and prone to smoking, drinking and taking drugs?

Without a doubt there are a few unscrupulous advertisers around today, but from what I can see, the reason we have so many fat, unhealthy kids or youngsters that get involved in drugs and all sorts of other bad habits has little to do with advertising and a lot with parents who don’t give a darn what programmes their kids watch on TV or what movies they go to.

These are parents who send their children off to shopping malls or to school without really caring about whether they have a proper lunch or just buy junk food. Nor do they care who their friends are.

These are also the parents who are so busy working, either out of necessity or avarice, that they don’t have time to guide and monitor their kids. And co-incidentally, the greedy ones are probably also the parents who tend to yell loudest about wanting to ban advertising. In short, what they are wanting to do is get government to take responsibility for protecting their kids, because they themselves can’t be bothered.

It is also a well-researched fact that when it comes to smoking, drinking, drugging, fashion, cellphones, music and all those other things that appeal to kids, advertising plays a relatively minor role in comparison with peer pressure. Just ask your kids next time they pester you for something. I’ll bet they won’t say: “Oh, I saw an ad for it”, but: “Because my friend has got one.”

In spite of drugs being such an enormous problem among our youth, I haven’t ever seen a single ad for cocaine, dagga or tik.

So, while advertising might not be entirely innocent of leading our youngsters astray, I doubt whether banning it would make much of a difference; the real culprits are parents who don’t have the time or the inclination to put a foot down when their kids tell them: “But Johnny’s allowed to go to the mall. Johnny’s allowed to see that movie.”

It’s all about being accepted and being cool. Kids don’t get into bad habits just on their own; they’re influenced almost entirely by their friends.

Banning advertising is hardly worth bothering about, but it does allow politicians to score brownie points and give the impression that they’re doing something positive.

Secondly, if advertising was so great an influence on kids, particularly teenagers and young adults, just where are they supposed to be seeing all this advertising? Research data over the past decade has shown that the mass media has lost contact with the 16-24 year old market, and that the number of youngsters in this category who read newspapers, listen to the radio or watch television is falling. It’s quite difficult to be influenced by advertising when you don’t see it.

It has been well documented that advertising is not a persuader but simply a promoter. For example, Colgate-Palmolive, one of the world’s biggest advertisers, announced recently that its profit rose by 47%, and said that the reason was that effective cost-cutting measures had meant that they were able to spend a lot more on advertising.

But that did not mean all the extra advertising persuaded people to start using things as toothpaste and soap powder, but that a lot of people started using Colgate’s products instead of those from competitors.

So, advertising certainly works. It must do, because companies such as, say, Pick n Pay, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Sony and other well known brands do not spend hundreds of millions of rands on advertising just because they get a kick out of seeing their names up in lights. They “invest” in advertising and can accurately predict what return they will have on their advertising investment.

Their advertising does not persuade people to start drinking cold drinks, to drive cars, to start watching TV or to start consuming groceries. All it does is get people who already drink cold drinks, watch TV, buy groceries and drive cars to try Coke, Toyota, Sony and Pick n Pay.