The dreamy video montage that opened last month's conference on marketing to children seemed designed to bring a tear to every advertiser's eye. "Let's take a look at the way it used to be," said the event's chair, veteran marketer Philip Spencer, before adding a tongue-in-cheek, "in the good old days."
Beamed on to a big screen in a conference room in the basement of a London hotel were clips of classic adverts from across the decades. There was "Don't forget the fruit gums, mum!" from 1956, Heinz's "Don't be mean with the beans, mum!" from the 1970s, right through to the McCain Oven Chips ad from 1989, which featured a hungry young boy booming "Feed me!" at his mother in a Desperate Dan bass. "If we could still do that sort of thing, I'm guessing none of you would be here now," said Spencer.
Watching the video was a select audience of over 100 representatives from the world's top brands, including Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Nestlé Rowntree, HSBC and Tesco.
All had paid more than £600 for a day-long masterclass organised by Marketing magazine, entitled "How do you create effective, yet ethical, campaigns that excite both children and their parents?" The day included sessions on the dos and don'ts of getting your brand into classrooms, how to harness pester power and how to use internet and mobile marketing to get to "technology-savvy" children.
All delegates were hoping to get tips on how to capture the children's market without getting in trouble with the regulators. Why they want to keep the business is a no-brainer: last year the charity Childwise estimated that children in the UK spend £4.2bn annually, an increase from £3.9bn in 2005. Other figures suggest that children assert an influence over almost 10 times that amount.
That is why firms that do not necessarily need to advertise to children to stay in the black still do so. When I asked the conference's keynote speaker, Jill McDonald, the aptly named chief marketing officer for McDonald's in northern Europe, whether the firm would still be commercially viable if it stopped targeting children in its marketing altogether, she admitted that it would - but that McDonald's was concentrating on being a force for good for children. "We have a responsibility to educate," she said. Quite how this tallies with the firm's current Shrek film tie-in, or the game-filled Kids Zone section of its website, where children are invited to shoot out McDonald's logos in a Space Invaders-type game, is unclear.
The advertising industry often likes to deny that it targets children at all. That is certainly the viewpoint taken by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, the trade body for 265 leading marketing and advertising agencies. "Advertisers don't target children," says Marina Palomba, the IPM's legal director, when I call. "It's a myth propagated by NGOs who think they know what they are talking about, but [who] don't." When I reel off a list of adverts that are clearly aimed at children, she concedes that "there is always going to be a rogue trader ... [and] they should be slammed down on." But generally, she says, adverts are aimed at parents.
Back at the conference on marketing to children, everyone seems well aware that this is a taboo topic: when some delegates found out that I was reporting on the conference for the Guardian (not difficult, as I was wearing a badge saying as much, introduced myself to everyone I spoke to as a journalist and had arranged my press ticket via the organisers), attempts were made to discourage me from writing about the day. "This is a sensitive topic and your presence is making people feel uncomfortable," I was told at the lunch break. They then asked me to give a 10-minute presentation to the room on my personal views on marketing to children - "it's only fair that we know where you stand," I was told. I refused, pointing out that I was there as a reporter, not a commentator.
Marketing to children using traditional media is more difficult in the UK than almost any other country in the world, after the media regulator Ofcom tightened regulations on advertising to children earlier this year. As of April 1, TV adverts for any foods that are high in fat, salt or sugar are banned for children (including those of pre-school age) "in or around programmes that are likely to be of particular appeal to children aged 4-9". And from January 1 next year, the ban will be extended to programmes aimed at all under- 16s. The ban applies to all channels, apart from the UK's 17 children's channels, which have until January 2009 to comply fully.
The law changes were top of the agenda at the conference, with delegates sympathising with each other on the difficulties they faced trying to find what organisers called "creative ways of working within the legislation": one woman complained that the famous cartoon character that had been used to advertise her company's sugary snack had been banned as a result of the regulation changes - "but only on TV. We can still use him on the packaging, which seems ludicrous."
And she wasn't the only one who thought the government had gone too far. In a panel discussion entitled "Dealing with the repercussions of the Ofcom legislation to ensure that you stay on the right side of lobbyists and the law", representatives from the advertising and food manufacturing industries complained about the government's stance on marketing to children. They also worried that things would only get worse under Gordon Brown.
"There will be an increasing pressure for banning, restricting and diminishing," said Baroness Peta Buscombe, a Tory peer who is chief executive of the Advertising Association, which represents the marketing and advertising industries. "We have to show the prime minister that we are really interested in the welfare of children because we will be in the spotlight in the coming months and years. We must not be surprised if things do not work out as we might have liked."
Yet many parents and pressure groups are campaigning for even tighter regulation. A particular worry is how marketers are using the internet and mobile phone technology to target children, exploiting their credulity, loyalty and lack of experience. This is more relevant than ever now that some 67% of children aged five to 16 have mobile phones and 25% of children have access to the internet in their bedrooms, according to the 2007 Childwise survey.
In response to G2's findings, the Department of Health said it had already expressed its concern to food and drink manufacturers and advertisers about these practices and was "monitoring closely the change in the nature and balance of food advertising".
MPs have also expressed concern. Nigel Evans, a member of the select committee for culture, media and sport, which monitors new media and the advertising industry, says that advertisers need to practise what they preach, both on and offline. "To me, it's like a chip shop owner saying he is not going to sell chips outside the school gates and then sneaking round the back to sell them," he says.
Labour MP Helen Goodman, meanwhile, recently launched the Commercialisation of Childhood Charter, which calls for a ban on all advertising to children under seven, in both broadcast and non-broadcast media, including instore marketing to children by way of displays, shop layouts and packaging. The charter is the product of a long-running campaign spearheaded by the left-wing pressure group Compass in association with a variety of voluntary organisations ranging from Play England to the Mothers' Union.
Although the Advertising Standards Agency's CAP code of conduct was recently extended to include online marketing to children, this remit only stretches as far as paid-for banner and pop-up adverts, and sales promotions. A rather obvious loophole remains that allows brands to fill their sites with cartoons and games that target children because such content is considered editorial, and not advertising.
Which is how Haribo, the German-owned sweets company, can get away with its brightly coloured website (advertised on the back of the packets) called Fun Planet, which is full of child-friendly games advertising its products. Children are invited into the Western Saloon, where they can play at cowboys, shooting flying cola-bottle sweets as they are catapulted towards distant teepees. They can go into a cartoon studio to watch Haribo adverts, and into space, where the astronauts are clutching packets of Haribo Starmix and you can shoot down asteroids.
Another example is the website of the lunchbox favourite Cheestrings, which has a children's quiz asking questions such as, "To keep teeth healthy, what is the best food to eat at the end of the meal? An apple or a Cheestring?" (The answer is Cheestring.)
Research shows it is worth a brand investing in such websites. A recent study carried out by Intuitive Media for New Media Age magazine interviewed more than 2,800 primary school children and found that 43% of them said they would buy or eat more of a food brand because they have seen it online or played a game about it. What is more, over 20% of them go online to find out about their favourite foods and snacks.
Other brands are using social networking sites and instant messaging chat programs to work "creatively" with the law. Bebo, the social networking site popular with children, is a particularly attractive outlet for brands. Currently Skittles is running a campaign via the site, as is A World of My Own (AWOMO, a new games platform for PCs that is due to launch later in the year). In the past, brands such as Pepsi and Vera Wang perfume have used Bebo to hawk their wares.
Bebo spokeswoman Sarah Gavin defends the site's partnerships with youth-oriented brands, saying it regularly turns down "inappropriate" advertising offers from gambling and alcohol companies. "We wouldn't do anything that would be detrimental to Bebo or our users," she says, adding that Bebo followed Ofcom and ASA guidelines and was working closely with the Home Office's internet task force for child protection, which aims to make the UK the safest place in the world for children to use the internet.
Habbo Hotel, a virtual world whose users in the UK are mainly aged between 12 and 16, is another favourite with brands, which, for a tidy fee, are able to set up their own "hang-outs" for children to visit. Currently, the CD compilation Now 67 has a room for kids to visit and in the past brands such as Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola and PlayStation have advertised there.
Instant messaging systems such as Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger) are also targeted by brands. The Transformers film is currently being heavily promoted using the program, and last year Sony Ericsson ran a two-month campaign to promote one of its Walkman phones, the W810i. Users could download a virtual "buddy" on to their contact lists, which could provide them with information on all the latest gigs, club nights and shows in their area - while plugging the new phone.
No wonder one session at the marketing conference was devoted to singing the praises of internet and mobile marketing. Alison Ruane, head of consumer and retail marketing at HarperCollins Children's Books, explained how the publisher was using social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace to market books. She quoted figures from Q Research that showed that a third of all UK teens had profiles on at least four social networking sites, and another study that reported that 75% of teenagers would happily receive adverts on their mobile phone in exchange for free credit.
Delegates jotted down these statistics happily, but there was one part of Ruane's presentation that created a quiet hiss of disapproval around the room. This related to an online campaign HarperCollins had recently run to promote the Georgia Nicolson books, aimed at 10- to 15-year-old girls. The company ran a competition on the "Fabbity-fab Confessions of Georgia Nicolson" website in which it challenged young readers to sign up as many friends as possible to the site. The winner won a Gucci handbag. "What an unbelievably inappropriate prize for a teenager," whispered one delegate from a marketing agency.
But it is not just on the internet that brands are targeting children. They are in schools too. This is nothing new. In the US, Channel One Network, a TV station that delivers adverts interspersed with teen-orientated new bulletins, has been beamed into American classrooms since 1990. And in Scotland, the drinks manufacturer AG Barr caused controversy by sponsoring school canteens in the late 1990s. As well as changing the menu to ape the "meal deal" formula used by fast food joints, at high schools such as Eastwood High on the outskirts of Glasgow, the company painted parts of the floor blue and orange and staff wore blue and orange caps to match the branding of its Irn-Bru drink.
Schools marketing has become a lot more subtle of late, however. One particularly interesting session at the conference was delivered by Mark Fawcett, chief executive of the National Schools Partnership, an agency he set up in 2003 to help brands get into classrooms. Fawcett began his 40 minutes by outlining the potential of the schools market: 10 million students, 13 million parents and one million teachers ripe to receive marketing messages. He then singled out a selection of school partnership deals he thought had worked particularly well. There was the deal the audio company Pioneer struck recently with 1,100 schools to promote its range of DJing equipment. The company joined forces with the former Radio 1 DJ Spoony for a campaign called Make Me A DJ, which provided schools with mixing software to encourage pupils to create mixes of their favourite tracks, which they then entered in a competition. The scheme was targeted at music teachers and designed to fit in with Key Stage 3 and 4 lessons as well as GCSE music.
Then there was the campaign by the bottled water company Volvic, which bought itself a place as a lead partner in the Fit for Life guides for schools with a mission to promote overall health and fitness among Key Stage 1-4 pupils. The company sponsored "hydration booklets", which emphasised the importance of drinking enough water for better learning and health.
Fawcett said that it was important for brands to be completely honest with schools about their intentions: "Don't pretend it's for something else," he said. He also urged companies not to forget to reap the PR benefits of any partnerships they enter in to.
He stressed that UK schools were far from saturated with brands. "If you are in a British school, you don't see brands all around you and you shouldn't," he said. "There is an upper limit, but we are nowhere near it."
But the message from the UK's largest teaching union is quite different. At its annual conference last Easter, the National Union of Teachers urged the government to ban all advertising and marketing activities on school premises. There are currently no laws governing branding in the UK's 32,000 schools. "Teachers should be free," it said, "to educate children on the benefits of following a healthy lifestyle without feeling that their teaching needs to be influ-enced by educational materials produced by the advertising and marketing industry."
Yet Palomba, of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, says that firms generally enter into school partnerships with a will to do good. "They should be applauded for it," she says. "I don't understand it when people say brands shouldn't support school sports days, for example. If they didn't, there might not be a sports day because the school couldn't afford it. Of course there is frequently self-interest on the part of the brand, but I don't see what's wrong with that."
Others, however, can't see what's right with it - or with the way advertisers' are embracing new technology. Whatever the marketers say, many adverts are "clearly" aimed at kids, says Richard Watts, of the Children's Food Campaign. "Industry likes to claim that it is advertising responsibly, but the truth is that it is just moving away from TV and on to the internet and text messages ... and stopping parents being able to monitor what children can see."
Transformers
The Hollywood studio Paramount has done a six-figure deal with Microsoft to plug the new Transformers film across Microsoft's digital network. Users of Windows Live Messenger Video Agent, a video talk program, are invited to add "Transformers Agent" to their contacts list. They can then chat to the "agent" and download trailers for the film, which they then share with friends. MSN's 22 million monthly users are also encouraged to customise their MSN homepages with a choice of four different Transformers backgrounds based on characters from the film. Adverts for the film are also running within certain Xbox 360 and PC games. Asked about the ethics of such a tie-in, Microsoft says: "As a responsible media owner we have always taken our duty of care to younger audiences seriously and, for example, we were the first network to close its chatrooms ... We have targeting technology in place based on our Passport data - the information [that is] supplied when users sign up to Windows Live Messenger - which allows us to prevent anyone under the age of 18 from seeing adverts deemed to be inappropriate."
Skittles
Many brands have created profiles on social networking sites, but Skittles' assault on Bebo (popular with children and younger teenagers) is the biggest. For a six-figure sum, Skittles has been allowed to create a Bebo profile, on which it invites users to create their own Skittles advert "that you can show off to all your friends on Bebo. Get creative and show us what Skittles mean to you." The winner's advert will be shown on TV and more than 1,000 entries had been received by the middle of last week. As of Sunday, Skittles UK had attracted 135 "friends" and many more had downloaded "skins" to "Skittle-ise" their own profiles. Bebo's Dominic Tillson explains the attraction for a brand. "They get thousands of brand advocates who are essentially promoting Skittles to their friends." He says it was totally ethical: "This is not push marketing. Users choose for themselves whether to take part," he says.
Polly Pocket
The toy's website (pollypocket.co.uk) is designed to look like Polly Pocket's living room and encourages children to sign up and visit regularly to accumulate points and win prizes - such as a special virtual disco dance from one of Polly's friends. You get more points by inputting the codes from Polly Pocket toys. There are games to play, adverts to watch and a regularly updated news section, which informs children of the latest "fabulicious" toys. One recent dispatch read: "Polly has a brand-new range of toys available in store now! Lots of new themes to choose from; Dance N Groove, Quik Click Drive Thru, Splashin Fashions and more! Click on the Toys section on Polly's home page to find out more or even go through to the Movies section to see them brought to life in Polly's new TV ads." When signing up, children have to give a parent's email address, and an email informs the parent that their child has joined the site. There is, of course, no way of ensuring that children input the correct address.
Irn-Bru
Irn-Bru has long been controversial for its youth marketing tactics, and was widely criticised for sponsoring school canteens in Scotland in the 90s and last year for branding the adventure playground at the Falkirk Wheel tourist attraction. These days, its website (irn-bru.co.uk) invites visitors to play Gasping Grannies, in which you have to quench the insatiable thirst of an Irn-Bru-addicted old lady. There is a competition to win a month's supply of the drink, which rewards the person who proves their love for Irn-Bru most compellingly, and there are downloadable stickers and screen savers.
Starburst
On the Starburst official website (starburst.com), under the section "games and stuff", children are invited to play a Space Invaders-type game called Chewblaster, where they have to dodge huge Starbursts as they fall from the sky. There is also a jewellery section, which gives instructions on how to turn Starburst wrappers into bracelets; downloadable Starburst screensavers and internet messaging icons; and a text messaging game advertising the Sour flavours, which invites children to text a "sour" message to their friends' mobiles. "I can smell you from here", "Check your fly" and "Know who likes you? Neither do I" are three SMS options, which are sent to the recipient with a plug for Starburst at the bottom. The brand was singled out for rebuke in last year's Which? report on marketing to children, Child Catchers, for its now-defunct gossip website, mouthwateringtv.co.uk, which was advertised regularly in teen magazines and featured pages of "mouthwatering" gossip and games - and plenty of Starburst plugs.
Now 67
The latest instalment of the never-ending compilation CD series is being advertised on virtual world Habbo Hotel (habbo.co.uk). The record company EMI/Virgin has paid for a special Now 67 room within Habbo called the Now 67 Summer Beach Cafe. Users, known as Habbos, can hang out in the room, place their orders for their favourite tracks, such as Rihanna's Umbrella, chat over an orange juice and dance at the disco. Habbos can stream tracks from the album into their own rooms and join in music quizzes, album launch parties and live music debates.
· The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Friday August 10 2007. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising was misnamed as the Institute of Practitioners in Marketing in the article above. This has been corrected.
