Ban TV advertising because some folk can't say 'no' to their children.

I've been busy so haven't touched on the latest anti-advertising campaign. A campaign of moronic ignorance but given acres of airtime and page space because, of course, it's 'for the children':

Mr Kent, a journalist and broadcaster, told the BBC he had seen the effect of advertising on his six-year-old son.

"He's like most children - if I don't get to the TV before him, he's grabbed the remote and found an ad," he said.

"It's like watching kiddie crack take hold, despite all our best efforts."

And what exactly does Kent Junior do when he's found an ad? We aren't told. Now maybe said junior has a vast trust fund and can spend it himself but somehow I suspect that the child only gets stuff that Mr or Mrs Kent buys for him.

Now let us be very clear about advertising "to children" - it is very rules bound (it you don't believe this check out the rules) and, when we speak of young children, they very rarely have any purchasing power. The advertising is directed to parents not children.

However, what should really bother us is that there is precisely and exactly no evidence - as in studies that test a scientific hypothesis - to support the contention being made by people like Mr Kent - indeed their cosy little lobby group, "Leave our kids alone", even admits this on its website:

The effect of advertising on children is an emerging area of research. As with most psychological studies the results are a little less clear cut than those in the field of physics or chemistry.

An the anti-advertising crowd then go on to cite three 'studies' none of which show any causal relationship between advertising and well-being let alone between advertising and parents giving into the pestering of their children. Let's take the National Consumer Council study - "Watching, Wanting and Well-being".(pdf) Apart from concluding that advertising bans won't work:

We found that, with children watching a much wider range of programmes than those made specifically for them, attempts to ban specific types of advertising in children’s programme time will not protect much of the under-14 population.

...the study finds that children weren't struggling or suffering as a result of watching TV:

Nearly nine in ten children believe that ‘I have a number of good qualities’ and 83 per cent say ‘I feel good about myself ’. Over seven in ten say ‘I feel that I’m a person of value, at least as valuable as other people’

Moreover, they discovered that children like stuff and knew (mostly) that to get the stuff you want you need money:

Over half of the children think they would be happier if they had more money to buy things for themselves. Nearly that many think the only kind of job they want when they grow up is one that gets them lots of money.

Rather than fretting about children being 'too materialistic' we should be celebrating the fact that half of them have recognised the central - and crucial - fact about our world: if you want the good stuff you need economic success.

The truth in all this is that adverting isn't the problem. The problem is parents who give in, who let their children pester them. In truth it's these nice middle-class parents like Mr Kent who are the problem - rather than facing up to their inability to resist advertising, they choose to first blame their children and secondly blame the advertisers. For what? For their inability to say "no".

So they compare TV advertising to smoking - that'll get a headline:

The tobacco industry managed to argue for years that cigarettes don't cause harm.

That's right folks, middle-class lefties journalists who can't say no to their children have this problem because of TV advertising. It is killing them! Look at the evidence:

Proving causality is difficult, especially when it's in an area as complex and nebulous as psychology

Bother. There isn't any evidence so let's just make stuff up:

Most parents will know instinctively that their children are deeply affected by advertising. They'll also know that children now are far more materialistic than children were 20 or 40 years ago

Are they? Show us the evidence? Oh dear, there isn't any. Here we go again.

Ban everything. It's for the children.
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No. Sitting doesn't make you obese. Eating too much does.

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Some halfwit American psychologist wants to ban television because it makes us obese. Trust me folks this man is a weapons grade nutcase:

On average, he says, a British teenager spends six hours a day looking at screens at home – not including any time at school. In North America, it is nearer eight hours. But, says Sigman, negative effects on health kick in after about two hours of sitting still, with increased long-term risks of obesity and heart problems.

No. Eating too much makes you obese not watching the telly. If Prof. Sigman believes otherwise then he really doesn't deserve the title "scientist".

There are 24 hours in the day and the child will spend around ten of them asleep. That leaves around eight hours of other stuff. But the clue to this lies elsewhere in the article (in the Guardian, now leading the way in nannying fussbucketry). This is about ensuring children lead a purposeful life - lying about doing fun stuff because it's fun can't be healthy can it?

The RCPH's Professor Blair said there were some simple steps parents could take, "such as limiting toddler exposure as much as possible, keeping TVs and computers out of children's bedrooms, restricting prolonged periods of screen time (we would recommend less than two hours a day) and choosing programmes that have an educational element."

If sitting watching a screen is bad, it doesn't matter what you're watching surely? Or is there some magic dust that flows from "educational" content that stops kids dying from watching the goggle box?

This is a classic piece of New Puritan propaganda. We must have a purposeful life and the over-riding purpose of life is for it to be a long as possible. Health is everything and any pleasure that does not serve this purpose must be stopped.

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Sunday mornings...

I don't know about you but I've never been able to get to grips with this habit of showing political programmes on a Sunday morning. There is a place for interviews with the great and the good, faux little debates and the endless scandal-mongering that passes for political journalism these days but it isn't for Sunday morning.

I gather from extensive investigation (I asked some bloke down the pub who seemed well informed) that this politicisation of the sabbath morn is, like so many other bad things, an import from our former colonies in North America. Which is odd because I though they were a deal more god-fearing than us and troop in their droves (do droves troop or rather meander?) to vast churches built using the same architects who, in England, design warehouses for electrical component distributors.

So now, as I sit with my morning tea (dreaming sweetly of bacon sarnies) before the telly, I am regaled with Andrew Marr interviewing some or other grandee - today it happens to be Nick Clegg. Marr's interviews do rather remind me of the "great microphone of state" and provide rather less insight than Desert Island Discs. It's almost like a staged, scripted event - a few gentle questions, the grandee getting his (it's usually a 'he') point across and Marr being able to extract just the one theatrical squirm from the interviewee.

Sunday mornings are to blame for this softball approach - if the interview was at seven thirty on a Wednesday evening, it would be all businesslike, stern and of infinitely greater value to the viewer (although less useful to the political superstar being grilled). Sunday mornings are for tea and slippers, for having breakfast in the garden, for the slow life. Sunday mornings are when we should savour things - the sun, the grass, our families and all the good things around us.

Sunday mornings aren't for politics.

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Why Number 10 needs a direct marketing expert as well as a TV guru!

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I was struck by Guido Fawkes’ surprisingly thoughtful piece on the current vacancy at Downing Street:

Television will help most voters decide who gets the credit, not broadsheet editorial leaders. Cameron and Clegg are better television performers than Miliband, if they want to exploit that they should hire a director of communications who understands televisual imagery. The media grid planning can be done by Downing Street drones a plenty and Osborne has a good grip on political strategy. Television requires a certain genius. If they want to win over the voters they need a political maestro equivalent to Simon Cowell or Roger Ailes.

Now I agree with this – all the more since on-line activity is rapidly converging with the telly and video is going to be a hugely important communications tool in coming years. However, I think the TV guru needs a right-hand man with another skill set. Not the newspaper skills that tend to dominate spin doctoring nor the blue-sky strategising that many like but an altogether more fundamental set of skills – direct marketing.

Yes the TV image matters but the techniques and technology is headed towards response-based media again. And frankly most in the media and government communications world simply don’t get interactivity and direct response marketing.

So while he’s looking for a TV guru, Dave should also search for a response marketing expert – someone who understands the down-to-earth world of mail order, appreciates the magic words that get response and gets the world that Walter Weintz* described in “The Solid Gold Mailbox”.

Linked to a powerful TV image, such a campaign could transform the way we run political communications – we would combine the ‘common touch’ of TV with the power of effective direct marketing to break past the media gatekeepers and create a direct televisual relationship with the voter.

*Weintz was the man who made Readers’ Digest all those millions by the way!

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Whose fault is it?

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Well it’s the most important question, isn’t it? All those things happen – from the deepest tragedy to head-in-hands farce – and we are concerned with fault. Nothing can occur without some call for enquiry, investigation, exposure and – in the end – blame. Whose fault is it? Who is responsible? Which head should we impale on a pole?

We pick up the papers, turn on the radio, watch the telly – and what do we get? A shallow, accusatory, offensive culture of finger-pointing. We are not interested in what should be done to put things right – if that can be done. We care not one jot for the sensitivities of those suffering. We just want to see someone nailed to the door with a notice of blame and responsibility.

After many years of watching Newsnight almost religiously I realised that the character of the programme reflected a rotten, stinking and unpleasant truth about us all. We were enjoying watching a cynical journalist asking “when did you stop beating your wife” questions of politicians, pundits and other scum who crossed his path. We were not presented with an exploration of the truth but with an exercise in tripwires and elephant traps – an interview the sole purpose of which was to catch out the interviewee and make the interviewer look clever.

I don’t watch Newsnight any more.

I stopped reading newspapers when I realised – from bitter personal experience – that almost nothing contained therein was accurate, well-researched or informing. The journalist takes just one interest in what we have to say – the single line, the accusation, the plea, the blaming of others. That is the story – whether it be tragedy or low politics, show business or the life of a child. Today news reporting – just like our politics – is a sub-branch of the entertainment business. And what we really like is to see someone else squirm – to point our accusatory finger and say ‘there’s the person to blame.”

I turned to the on-line world – to the cornucopia of wonders that is the Internet. Perhaps there we will find something of what was lost. But not surprisingly that world is also filled with the casting of aspersions, with bullying, with the idle accusation easily made and above all with the laying of blame. Each day I read the same stuff – pointing fingers at one or other person for their supposed blameworthiness, endless calls for enquiry, for legal action and for people’s lives to be destroyed. All on a whim and at the touch of a button.

In all this sport – this festival of personal attack and accusation – we have lost sight of some of the really important things. If I lose my job, I can thrash around looking for someone else to blame for my predicament – the boss, the management, the economy, the Government. It’s a natural response – quite understandable in its way – but of no value to me or my family. My concern should be with what I do tomorrow not with why yesterday went wrong. Let’s suppose I can find someone to blame – where does that get me? I still have no job.

Don’t get me wrong I do care about responsibility. I think we should admit to our mistakes. And, on occasion, it is proper that those mistakes are punished. But let’s get a little balance? Let’s also give our attention to being accurate. To being understanding. And above all let’s give people space to explain, to tell their story.

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There's a chance the revolution - or at least "the change" - will be televised!

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As you all know, I like Julian Dobson’s ‘Living with Rats’ blog – despite his tendency to get a bit too greeny-greeny for my preference. And his latest post calling for ‘smarter citizenship’ is a little gem. Not just because if contain the line; “beware the rise of the geekocracy” but because it recognises that things – that change stuff, you know – are driven by consumers. Not by Governments, not by businesses, not by “social entrepreneurs” (as an aside – definition of an anti-social entrepreneur is a bankrupt) but by us, the little old consumer doing what we want to do. Here’s Julian:

“The third approach, which most of us adopt one way or another, is as consumers. We increasingly expect high speed broadband so we can watch on-demand TV or share videos or pictures. We grumble when the service isn’t working or costs too much, but don’t spend a lot of time imagining what we could do with it. It’s just there to respond to our wants.”

What we read here is the market working its wonders. The market that will deliver the stuff that responds to peoples needs, wants, demands. And we need to look at the speed with which TV and the Internet are combining (I’ve said before that Rupert Murdoch might be rather more on the ball than you think with his Times paywall) and at what that means for communications.

The core of all this will be the television not the computer. Oh, I know you’re all watching TV shows on your lap-tops, downloading them to watch while travelling and even (for reasons entirely beyond me) loading short clips onto your mobiles. But that big square thing in your living room is the tool that matters. Why? Because everyone who wants one has one. And with digital signals, interaction via a phone line and push button response via the remote control, the television will be the weapon of choice in the future of digital communications.

True we’ll be tweeting, texting and interacting with mobile phones, we’ll be surfing the wonders of the web on lap tops and mac books but most other folk will be using the TV. As Norfolk’s Wherry Housing Association have shown this can be a pretty useful tool:

“Wherry Digital TV offers services similar to those on this website but can be accessed on Sky and Virgin TV using your remote control, on your mobile phone, on your computer and on the Nintendo Wii.”

On this you can report repairs, check details from the association, link to job centre plus, check bus and train times, make GP appointments and make a complaint. Not the most exciting telly, I know but I’m sure there’s more to come – you never know maybe you’ll be able to read The Times on your TV screen soon? And this service isn’t being funded by a generous government grant or by one or other philanthropic foundation. It isn’t being charged for – it’s just another way for the landlord to keep in touch. Plus a few other serivces. And all through the telly.

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Eurovision and social capital - some thoughts....

Last Saturday over 8 million Brits spent a fun evening watching the Eurovision Song Contest despite the inevitability of the British entry languishing at the bottom of the pile as always. Now this doesn’t make Eurovision quite the most important event of the year – I guess the finals of the X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent will get a bigger audience and one of the Great Debates in our recent election got more viewers.

However, Eurovision has become a mark in the calendar, something we share as a nation – part of the social capital of Britain. Now before you all rush off let me explain. Much of our TV viewing is only marginally social – if it’s not a solitary activity, it’s shared only with our immediate family and friends. Indeed, some critics of our modern culture single out the goggle-box as a prime culprit for the loss of social capital.

However, events like Eurovision belie that gloomy prognosis. What we see is a much broader engagement – not only the large numbers of viewers but all the other aspects of social interaction. There’s pubs and clubs organising Eurovision nights, some people get together with a bottle or two of cheap fizz and some chocolates and others make it a big family occasion. Workplaces have sweepstakes, the newspapers are full of stories and twitter, facebook and other bits of the interwebs abound with chitter-chatter. It’s more than just a TV event.

And today – whether or not we like it – these televisual events, Eurovision, X-Factor, World Cup and BGT, represent a new calendar. These are as much part of the social fabric as Christmas, Easter and Bank Holidays. But more importantly still they provide a bridge – these events allow us to interact, to get together and to share something – even something a trivial as a singing contest. We are provided with the means to engage in conversation – and this works even when the other person thinks Eurovision is a dreadful festival of plastic pop! We have an opinion, there’s no indifference and this results is positive engagement – building what has been called ‘social capital’.

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