Are Animated Characters Killing Our Children?
In June 2015, Coca-Cola Amatil was forced to apologise and pull their campaign for Fanta, as it was found to target children too heavily. The ad features a variety of teenagers playing on slides of Fanta, generally being happy. The ad does not depict over-consumption of the product, but nor does it even hint at the medical consequences of consumption. If you’re interested in the details of the ban, the full article is here . I’d rather use my time to explore the debate around the media’s impact on youth, and whether this ad deserved to be pulled.
Naturally, there are plenty of reasons why this ad is controversial. The first of these, and this is something even I’ll concede, is that this ad was targeted towards children. There’s a trend in advertising that your target usually has a desired age, which normally gravitates towards 25. If you want to aim for a 10 year old, you use a 15 year old, because that’s who they want to be.
If you want to sell to a 40 year old, cast someone 35. If this ad was using mid-teens to sell to mid-teens, they’d have been tragically missing the mark. Then, there’s the imagery, slogans, and colour schemes, all very engaging to children. If you remember
that Lynx is selling to the same demographic Fanta claimed to be targeting, you can spot a few small differences in their styles.
There are also the serious health implications of soft drinks. In Australia, one in four children are overweight, and it’s widely believed that the largest source of sugar for children is soft drinks such as Fanta. There’s no way around it, this is an issue that must be, in some way, rectified. Children deserve the right to grow up free from health complications such as diabetes, and efforts should be made to provide it.
Furthermore, advertising works. If a message is logically aimed to a target market, it will sell. While this ad isn’t going to clean up at the award nights, it’s an industry standard ad. This ad will aid in convincing people to buy the product. And, with all the evidence that shows the damage Fanta can do to kids, this ad will convince consumers to buy a harmful product.
There’s a strong argument to ban the ad, as ended up happening here. But what this means is that regulatory bodies, alike with lobbying groups genuinely believe that if you ban kids from knowing about Fanta, obesity plummets. Unfortunately, like a large number of public panics concerning the media, this one has huge problems.
The first problem for the anti-Fanta campaign are the logistic factors of acquiring the product. When all is said and done, the message has resonated with the consumer and the decision has been made to purchase, what can kids actually do about it? When I was young, my parents gave me soft drink on very select occasions, and were quick to say ‘no’. Assuming that this was an evil, dark, insidious message developed by masters of psychology to brainwash children into drinking Fanta, it wouldn’t work in the slightest if parents say ‘no’. That is, of course, unless we let children wander around unsupervised and with the money to buy it themselves. But I seriously doubt 25% of children get this luxury, and if they do, we have a much larger problem than a silly little ad.
Next is the issue regarding the advertising of dangerous substances, like Fanta. Sure, you could argue here that Fanta is advertising a dangerous product, and such ads should be banned. This would move Fanta into an exclusive club with cigarettes as a product still legal in Australia, but perceived as having no other option than causing harm. But, soft drinks are different. Fanta is not something that once consumed will harm a consumer, it will harm someone if enjoyed outside of a balanced diet. Fanta is not dangerous, overuse is, which falls to the consumer. One could argue that this Fanta ad did not explain this; that the product risks are not addressed, which is a fair argument. However, this ad wasn’t banned for that, it was banned for being colourful and appealing to children. So, the Australian Standards Bureau is basically saying you can ignore the potential health risks, you can be deceptive, you just can’t target sweets at children.
This leads straight to the big media issue with this argument; are kids that impressionable? I work with kids on a daily basis as both a tennis coach and a science show performer, and I can assure you that kids don’t listen anyway. But in relation to the influence of media, the world has already seen and debunked the moral panics surrounding video games, television, comic books, jazz music, the Gutenberg bible, and far more. When we seem unsure of the effects or influences of media, society tends to assume the worst. In this case, I honestly don’t feel that an ad such as this is so evil in its influence that kids will have no choice but to drink Fanta.
At the end of the day, this isn’t a debate over how impressionable kids are, or how effective advertising is; this is a moral issue. In times when childhood obesity rates are alarmingly high, is it moral to promote the product responsible? If you’re unsure, here’s a timesaver. If you think that kids have the money, the availability and the naivety to buy Fanta on their own based purely on this ad, then it should be banned. If like me, you think that kids are nowhere near as daft as we assume, and parents/guardians have the final say on the purchase, then we should still be watching it on TV.
