BBC.
Advertising aimed at children of primary school age and younger should be banned, a group of authors, journalists and academics has said.Do these people not realise there is an off button (or standby button on the remote) and that parents really should not be allowing the tv to be the oblong babysitter? Oh yes I'm sure some advertisers believe that they can persuade kids to badger their parents into giving them what they want. However that's a reflection on the parents, not the advertisers or kids. Parents after all have the right to say 'no' no matter how hard their kids throw a wobbler at them. That some parents can't is probably a reflection on the infantilism that successive governments have made of our populace, certainly the pressure group is a reflection of a lobbying campaign that seems to be in danger of giving the government a new set of powers, something which will later come back to bite the buggers on the arse no doubt when the legislation suffers from some politician using it in a way that the group never envisaged, it's known as mission creep. After all, those in favour of RIPA never envisaged it being used to track down people suspected of school catchment fraud.
The group supports a new campaign called Leave our kids alone which says techniques aimed at manipulating adult emotions and desires are being used on children as young as two in the UK.
Campaign co-founder Jonathan Kent says the adverts are like "kiddie crack".
But the advertising watchdog says rules on advertising to children are strict.
'Leave our kids alone' will hopefully drop the issue eventually, I do hope so as there's a real danger that they'll get what they asked for in the worst possible way...
3 annotations:
Stonyground:
It must be about ten years ago that there was a discussion on BBC Radio 4 about TV advertising that was aimed at children. The bansturbator was totally trounced. Other countries that had tried it, with various disasterous unintended consequences, were cited. There was also a junior vox-pops that showed that kids, rather than being helpless victims of the advertising industry, had developed a healthy scepticism with regard to the advertiser's claims, in contrast to the kids from the countries where such bans had been imposed, who tended toward extreme gullibility.
I expect they willbe in favour of bringing back Section 28 too then!
How many members of 'Leave Our Kids Alone' are also members of "Hacked Off"?
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