Stephen Colegrave does not look like a monster. The svelte figure of the marketing director of Saatchi & Saatchi is topped by a friendly, candid face. His dress is smart, but democratically casual. The shirt is buttoned to the neck. The tie, which might mark him as a fuddy-duddy bureaucrat, has been thrown away. Colegrave has the manner of a modern guy; a creative and a bit of a reb, not some mind-bender from an authoritarian hierarchy.
He is the star of a telling documentary, Getting Older Younger, which will be shown on BBC2 on 3 November. Ed Harriman, the producer and director, is an investigative journalist of the old school. To his surprise, he found he didn’t have to jam his foot in doors to get the canniest advertisers in Britain to confess to their manipulation of children. “You guys spend more money trying to understand how to get what you want from them than the government or the schools,” he said. “Tell me how you do it.” And they did, without compunction. Barely one hesitant word or inflection betrayed a fear that viewers might see them as corrupters of youth.
In the film, a gleeful Colegrave reflects on the ease with which the young – or “the kids”, as he and nearly everyone else in advertising calls them – can be persuaded to pester their parents into buying the right brand. “Brands are the stamp of authenticity,” he says with a smile. “In the playground, if you have the wrong type of training shoes, then you are excluded. The thing about kids is, yes, they are keen to be individuals, but there is nothing worse than not being the right type of individual who is included in the group . . . If you have something nearly right, if you’ve just got it slightly wrong, then it’s completely wrong.”
In case Colegrave’s plain-speaking leaves the audience in any doubt about the attractions of youth to commerce, Peter Mead, chairman of the agency Abbott Mead Vickers, informs us that “the great thing about them is that their memory banks are relatively empty so any message that goes in gets retained.”
Angela Humphries, from a market research industry that runs focus groups on the brand awareness of toddlers as young as two, becomes almost mystical as she gushes about the “physical and emotional” personalities of the crisps she market-tests, but none the less shows faint signs of possessing a working conscience. When Harriman presses her on what advice she would give children who are ridiculed in the playground because their parents can’t afford to respond to the hype, her voice falls to a pained stutter. “You should do your own thing, y’know, y’know . . . do what’s right for you,” she says, without realising that if children or their parents behaved as genuine individuals – rather than the “right type of individuals” – and did what was right for them, she might be out of a job.
The new frankness is worth noting. An ideology can be said to have defeated its rivals and become received wisdom at the moment when its proponents lose their need to dissemble. The self-confidence that flows from realising they will not face a serious challenge from the left, religion or traditional conservatism obliterates the need for corporate boosters to play the hypocrite or hide behind obfuscation. Until recently, advertisers denied they influenced behaviour. They merely reminded customers of the existence of products or persuaded them to switch from one brand to another. Their patter was humbug, but at least it recognised that others expected them to behave with restraint.
But the long boom of the nineties has emboldened the industry. The products that symbolise globalisation get their value from branding. Without its manufactured promise of freedom and youth, Coca-Cola is just sticky, brown water and Nike trainers are sweaty pumps made by sweated Asian labour. Without McDonald’s £1.25 billion annual promotion budget, a Big Mac is a cow, processed beyond recognition. Humphries is not alone in finding a spiritual dimension in the least durable of goods. Brand worship is the idolatry of the business schools and press.
If hubris afflicts the advertising industry, therefore, it does so for good reason. Globalisation is as much about marketing as privatisation and free trade.
British politicians may fight cigarette advertising – smokers being the lepers of the age – but in all other respects they are the industry’s accomplices. Sweden is proposing a ban in all European Union states on commercials aimed at children. At a meeting of the UK’s parliamentary group on advertising in February, all but two MPs dismissed the prospect of this mild regulation as preposterous. Kids were “savvy, media-literate and surprisingly cynical”, the majority concluded. They didn’t need protection. If a few were being exploited, said the compassionate Virginia Bottomley, then that was their parents’ fault. The odds on the British backing the Swedes range from the long to the laughable.
In this climate, the hucksters’ opponents can seem marginal figures: socialist haters of corporate power, perhaps, or Blimps who believe the country went to the dogs when Mary Whitehouse was shunned. For to worry about advertising means worrying about television – not the propriety of this or that programme, but the effects of the medium as a whole. And what living fossil wants to risk mockery by questioning a pervasive audio-visual culture that seems as natural and essential as the air we breathe?
Yet those who defend the status quo are pushed into the bizarre position that an environment saturated with images has no effect on its inhabitants. Children see 18,000 adverts a year, according to a study by Friends of the Earth. Peter Mead admits that “this generation of kids is being bombarded by more messages than any other group of kids in history”. The cost of promoting toys and games has increased fivefold in ten years. The advertising industry as a whole was worth £14.4 billion in 1998. When spending on the related “professions” of public relations and marketing is added to that total, industry analysts affirm that we spend as much on the cozening of consumers as Germany and France combined. Britain, in short, is the most commercialised country in Europe.
Few sensible commentators believe that “savvy, media-literate and cynical” children – is that, incidentally, what Bottomley and her colleagues want them to be? – can deal with the assault. The American critic Thomas Frank elegantly demonstrated in The Conquest of Cool: business culture, counterculture and the rise of hip consumerism that advertising has had few difficulties with cynicism since the sixties. Commerce wants the young to be rebellious, if rebellion means changes in style that necessitate a discarding of the still serviceable old for the consumption of the expensive new. Savvy advertisers have the advantage over adolescents and are more than able to turn cynicism into ironic adverts which justify consuming as a revolt against the square establishment that includes every coercive force except their clients. Modern agencies would no more produce a crude hard sell without a complicit wink than Stephen Colegrave would knot an old school tie without a sardonic grin.
The industry itself admits that relentless commercial pressure is forcing a retreat from childhood. Colegrave says that the “cut-off point for buying toys has been falling by one year every five years”. Most of today’s children stop playing with Lego when they are six or seven. Martin Phelps, the business director of Ogilvy & Mather, believes that the premature ageing of children is more striking in Britain than in any other developed nation.
Angela Humphries recounts how she once made the mistake of asking seven-year-old girls what toys they liked. They looked at her as if she were mad. They wanted make-up and nail varnish. They pulled up their shirts to showed her their superfluous bras. With the exception of the very young, children watch adult television. Their favourite programmes are soaps. Their favourite adverts are for beer, cars and shampoos. Advertisers are better informed than anyone on what fascinates children and admit to creating their “adult” commercials with children in mind: a process that simultaneously debases the young and infantilises the mature.
Their opponents condemn the selling of sweets and toys. Friends of the Earth runs pre-Christmas roadshows where children are warned against falling for The Fibby (“Talks Rubbish, Looks Rubbish, Becomes Rubbish!”) and My Little Phoney (“Guaranteed to Disappoint!”). Advertisers can’t like the protests, but I suspect that when childish things are being put away at six, they realise that the pressure groups are firing wide of the mark. Most toys and sweets are cheap. The far greater prize is to enlist children to persuade their parents to buy food, drink, PlayStations, computers and televisions or, indeed, the commercially correct brand of family car. An advert for Mastercard, which is running at the moment, illustrates the double-edged tactic perfectly. A middle-aged mother twirls in girlish delight and draws admiring whistles from her young children as she shows off the figure-hugging dress her marvellous Mastercard bought. Just who is meant to be the knowing woman who understands the joys of sex and credit and who is the innocent bairn is as obscure in this narrative as in dozens like it.
You can’t blame advertising exclusively for the sexualisation of the young, or wanton greed. Fear of cars, crime and curfews keeps children at home where new technologies give an infinite choice and tiny variety of images. Fear of their parents divorcing makes them edgy and sophisticated beyond their years.
But to pretend that advertising reflects rather than drives society is absurd when its practitioners are busily organising the commercial colonisation of public and private space. Strange careers have been invented to ensure that not a single opportunity to persuade is missed. There are self-styled “guerrilla advertisers” at a London agency called Cake who target the most alienated of adolescents. Instead of getting at them with conventional selling techniques, which might be dismissed with a bored shrug, they project the slogans of a 24-hour banking service – “We’re Awake Too” – on to the walls of all-night clubs and get their clients’ products talked about in all the right places by giving free samples to the “1,000 coolest people” in Britain.
Harriman found a “consumer psychologist” for business – Peter Cooper – who looks like a distinguished old academic and opines from a study crammed with books, tasteful prints and Victorian phrenological heads. The viewers’ vague impression that they are watching J K Galbraith is spoilt only when Cooper leans forward and confesses, with the long “ooo” vowel of the best Queen’s English, his love for “Sooper Dooper Noodles” commercials. Cooper sub-consciously reveals the industry’s ambition by appropriating the language of radical opposition and turning it on its head. Mothers who want to protect gullible children from manipulation are condemned as frumpy “regressives”, while those who don’t mind the young being exploited are “progressive” and “independent”. The fears of regressive mums can be heightened by adverts warning that their children will be infected with E-coli unless they buy Dettol or some other disinfectant. The gaiety of the forward-thinking “progressives” can be encouraged by showing their children as miniature adults at ease with consumption.
The clearest evidence that advertising is not a passive force does not come from psychological institutions, but from the schools – the last sanctuary from puffery for children and a beckoning final frontier to the agencies.
In Britain and America, progressive governments will the end of an educated population, but are not prepared to will the means of increased taxation. The circle is being squared in both countries by uncontrolled commercial sponsorship.
Just after the 1997 general election, when the Labour government’s intentions were becoming clear, I asked Stephen Byers, an education minister at that time, if he could think of any companies that should be excluded from the classrooms. He couldn’t, and I wrote that we might soon see a literacy campaign sponsored by the illiterate Sun. I meant it as a joke. The next week Byers announced that News International had graciously agreed to support summer reading schools.
Corporate funding of education has grown so fast that 85 per cent of British schools allowed promotion in their classrooms last year. Now if you’re worried that your children are not receiving a “relevant” education, McDonald’s will give their teachers free packs which recommend that history should be taught by forcing children to “explore the changes in use of the local McDonald’s site” and suggest that their musical sensibilities should be improved by rousing them to make up words for “Old McDonald had a Store” to the tune of “Old McDonald had a Farm”.
If you want them to have textbooks, collect the tokens on Walkers crisp packets or in the Murdoch press. If your school is short of exercise books, advise the head to contact Lasting Impressions of Kingston-upon-Thames, which will provide colourful “Jazzy Books” packed with advertising, gratis. If a larger purchase is required Imagination School Media and Marketing will pay £10,000 or more for billboard sites in the playgrounds and corridors.
In 1994, a US advertising entrepreneur, Chris Whittle, who managed to appal both the American left and right, explained the unique selling-point that schools present to companies: “The advertiser gets kids who cannot go to the bathroom, cannot change the station, who cannot listen to their mother yell in the background, who cannot be playing Nintendo.”
Whittle created a television network called Channel One which offered impoverished US schools what appeared to be a bargain. They would each get free use of a satellite receiver, videos, televisions and a public address system. All they had to give in return was a promise that they would force pupils to watch a ten-minute current affairs broadcast each day with two minutes of advertising in the middle. Pepsi, Reebok, the US military, Twix and Clearasil were prepared to pay $200,000 (£125,000) for a 30-second message to a captive teen market which could not play truant from the consumer society. Compulsory viewing of commercials that have the authority of the school behind them has been imposed on eight million children a year. Inadvertently, Whittle had organised a mass controlled experiment.
Educationalists tested advertisers’ claims that they were merely passive conveyors of information by comparing the attitudes of Channel One children with those of their contemporaries in neighbouring schools. It turned out that Whittle’s viewers were far more likely than their peers to agree with propositions such as: “a nice car is more important than school”, “money is everything” and “designer labels make a difference”. One academic finished a study of Channel One with the conclusion that at root the messages its sponsors delivered were “Watch. Don’t Think”, “Let Us Fix It”, “Eat Now”, “You’re Ugly” and “Just Say Yes”. Channel One proves that even punch-drunk American children can have their values pounded if advertisers find a fresh way to land their blows.
Whittle’s parent company, Edison, is bidding to run British schools in David Blunkett’s business-friendly Education Action Zones. It will find a home from home. Stephen Colegrave anticipates prosperous times for his colleagues and clients. “The great thing is if you go into a school these days, they are actually open to commercialisation!” he says. “I’d love to be a kid today. I’m a commercialist for the future.”
Unless politicians assert that society has slightly higher ambitions for its children than to package them as the “right type” of consuming individuals, then a gormless and perpetually dissatisfied tomorrow will belong to Colegrave and his kind.
Content from our partners
Related
