Swedish call for ban on TV advertising to children faces defeat

Date: 19/10/00

By Renée Cordes

ADVERTISING agencies are not exactly shaking in their boots over Sweden's plans to push for an EU-wide ban on television commercials targeted at children.

Since commercial TV was introduced in the Scandinavian country ten years ago, adverts aimed specifically at children have been prohibited. The Swedish government argues that the ban is necessary to prevent youngsters from falling prey to advertising campaigns and pestering their parents to take them shopping. Stockholm has warned that it will seek to extend its rules to the rest of the EU when it takes over the Union's presidency at the beginning of next year.

The threat comes as other member states are also taking steps to limit commercial advertising to children. Denmark is considering a ban on all advertising around children's programmes, and the UK government is sponsoring research to determine the causes of increasing obesity among children, including the impact of advertising on youngsters' eating habits.

Greece was also cleared by the EU to continue banning toy adverts aimed at children when the European Commission decided to drop its threat of legal action against the country last year. That decision infuriated toy-makers and advertisers, who claimed the law breached single market rules.

The EU's advertising industry is nervous about member states' efforts to restrict their activities, especially as policy-makers get ready for a broader review of the Union's 1989 'TV Without Frontiers' directive next year.

But even though advertising agencies and makers of children's products are watching developments at the national level very closely, few believe that Sweden will succeed in winning governments' support for Union-wide restrictions. "We have no doubt that Sweden will raise the issue," said Stephan Loerke of the World Federation of Advertisers. "The issue is gaining momentum in member states, but there is no majority on paper."

The debate comes amid a boom in the advertising market for children's programming, especially with digital cable and satellite television services expanding at lightning speed. Current EU legislation leaves most of the responsibility for controlling the industry to member states, although it insists that advertising should not cause "moral or physical detriment to minors".

One of the justifications cited for banning TV advertising aimed at children is the need to protect parents from constant requests from youngsters to buy products they may or may not need. Critics claim that the influence of TV advertising undermines the authority of parents who eventually succumb to children's demands.

The industry responds by pointing to a 1999 study which found that adults were hardly bothered by children's pestering. The study surveyed parents in Sweden, where TV adverts to children are banned, and Spain, where they have been on the airwaves for more than 40 years.

Of those survey respondents who cited pestering as a problem, few believed that banning adverts targeted at children would solve it. However, nearly one in five Swedish adults felt that a ban on such advertising would help, compared to just one in ten Spanish adults.

The advertising industry claims the study's findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of the Swedish ban and undermine the argument that TV advertising increases pestering by children. Proponents of bans on TV adverts also claim they influence children to eat unhealthy foods, sometimes falsely touting them as nutritious snacks. But industry argues that in a typical family, children have little influence on food-buying decisions.

Article forms part of a survey 'EU and the media'.