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Get MediaSmart®: A Critical DiscourseAnalysis of Controversy AroundAdvertising to Children in the UKTerry O'SullivanPublished online: 20 Aug 2007.
To cite this article: Terry O'Sullivan (2007) Get MediaSmart®: A Critical Discourse Analysis ofControversy Around Advertising to Children in the UK, Consumption Markets & Culture, 10:3,293-314, DOI: 10.1080/10253860701365397
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Consumption, Markets and Culture,
Vol. 10, No. 3, September 2007, pp. 293–314
ISSN 1025–3866 (print)/ISSN 1477–223X (online) © 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10253860701365397
Get MediaSmart®: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Controversy Around Advertising to Children in the UKTerry O’SullivanTaylor and Francis LtdGCMC_A_236431.sgm10.1080/10253860701365397Consumption, Markets and Culture1025-3866 (print)/1477-223X (online)Original Article2007Taylor & Francis Group Ltd103000000September 2007Dr TerryO’[email protected]
In response to calls for increased regulation of advertising to children (occasioned by
concerns over childhood obesity levels) a group of UK advertisers targeting young people
have sought to demonstrate social responsibility by providing media literacy education
resources for children aged six to eleven through the MediaSmart® initiative. This article
draws on Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 2001) to analyse a selection of publicly
available accounts of the 2002 launch and operation of MediaSmart® in order to explore
how alternative discursive representations of MediaSmart® construct children and adver-
tising in relation to one another, and how these constructions work to further the social
practices of which the discourses in question are part. The analysis concludes that the
competing discourses have a stake in the problem of advertising to children remaining
open-ended, but suggests that the possibilities of its resolution lie in (a) the incorporation
of children’s own perspectives in controversy conducted on their behalf by adults, and (b)
conceptions of media literacy which are more active and age-inclusive than those evident
in the discourses currently available.
Keywords: Advertising; Children; Critical Discourse Analysis; Media Literacy;
MediaSmart®
Introduction
After an advance publicity campaign lasting the best part of two years, MediaSmart®
was launched in late 2002 by a group of UK advertisers with interests in marketing to
children. Its launch leaflet (aimed at recruiting support from other advertisers and
Terry O’Sullivan is a lecturer in Marketing at the Open University Business School, UK.
Correspondence to: Dr Terry O’Sullivan, Open University Business School, Michael Young Building, Walton
Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK; Email: [email protected]
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advertising agencies) describes it as “a programme for primary school children that aims
to develop media competence through a range of teaching and advertising materials”
(MediaSmart® 2002). UK primary schools are the equivalent of first through fifth grades
in the United States, catering for children between the ages of five and eleven. Modelled
on a Canadian industry-led initiative from the 1980s, MediaSmart® has produced teach-
ers’ resources aligned to the UK’s National Curriculum, television advertisements, and
an interactive web site (www.mediasmart.org.uk). Critics have dismissed it from the
outset as an industry fig-leaf to pre-empt calls for the tighter regulation, or even aboli-
tion, of advertising to younger children (Rogers 2002). Defenders maintain that it
demonstrates social responsibility on the part of a marketing industry seeking to engage
with vulnerable stakeholders (Asscher 2002). MediaSmart® thus acts as a sharp focus
for the emotive debate around advertising to children—a debate engaged in by
concerned adults on children’s behalf, but suggesting tensions around adults’ own roles,
responsibilities, and relationship to children in contemporary consumer society.
Cook (2003, 119) traces the genealogy of commercialised childhood to the early
decades of the twentieth century, drawing on historical retailing literature to reveal
“working models of ‘the child’ as a knowing, independent consumer”. Attempts to
shield children from the market also have a long history. Kunkel at al. (2004) preface
their report on the psychological implications of contemporary children’s advertising
with a quotation from an 1874 Act of Parliament pledging to protect children “from
their own lack of experience and from the wiles of pushing tradesmen and moneylend-
ers” (2004, 1). The struggle between advertisers keen to expand their franchise to ever
younger customers, and consumers determined to constrain them, is about plenty
beside what is immediately at stake. In establishing their respective claims for the rights
and limits of children and advertising, the participants draw on complex networks of
assumptions and positions about the nature of childhood and business, and how adults
and children relate through managed consumption.
Attempts to make sense of skirmishes on this front of the culture wars thus need to
acknowledge the systemic underpinnings of the conflict, and their implications for how
consumption and markets are socially constructed and politically managed. They also
need to take account of the real social consequences of policy in this area, which have
been argued to include challenges to the physical and mental welfare of young people
from an “advertised diet” of food unremittingly high in fat, salt and sugar, and the
pervasive pressure of the commercial environment (Hastings et al. 2003; Kunkel et al.
2004; Mayo 2005). Critical discourse analysis (hereafter CDA) is acknowledged, even
by critics such as Hammersley (1997), as a social research method which emphasises
the systemic nature of social phenomena in order to reveal ideology at work, and which
takes a position on its practical consequences. It therefore recommends itself as a meth-
odology to explore and understand the issue of advertising to children, as well as form-
ing a basis for policy recommendations. This paper uses CDA (following Fairclough
2001) in order to analyse a range of accounts (from press-releases, journalism, official
reports, and political speech) of the launch and early operation of MediaSmart® as
an exemplary engagement in the conflict around advertising to children. It aims to
recognise how these accounts construct advertising and children in relation to one
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Consumption, Markets and Culture 295
another, going beyond their surface work of reportage, advocacy, criticism or evalua-
tion, to examine the links between the representations they perform and the wider
social practices (such as journalism, marketing and political activism) in which they are
enmeshed.
Adults not only disagree about the subject of advertising to children, but are deeply
implicated in it. Commenting on American society, Cross (2002) links what he sees as
a contemporary decline in “the historic parental goal of sheltering the child from the
consumer market” to ambiguity about the nature of childhood arising from the
complicity of adults in the commercial construction of children: “Modern American
adults view children as creatures to be protected from the consumer market and, at the
same time, as recipients of consumer spending in a process that has gradually under-
mined traditional bourgeois paths to maturity” (Cross 2002, 442). In short, adults’
assuaging of their own needs (nostalgic or sentimental) through spending on, and for,
children has had the effect of accelerating children into the role of consumers them-
selves, in ways which emphasise their agentive power at the possible expense of their
developing judgement. The globalisation of consumer culture means that this is hardly
peculiar to the US, and neither is it a trivial issue given that goods and services aimed
at the four to fifteen age group are worth $450 billion world-wide (Euromonitor 2002,
13). This spending is divided between children’s own spending and spending by others
(much of which they influence) and includes both products targeted exclusively at
children as well those (such as fast food and soft drinks) which cross over to adult
consumers.
The child/consumer is held in a tension between self-realisation and control: self-
realisation through making or influencing identity-oriented purchases such as fash-
ion, music and entertainment (Mayo 2005); control, as a source of concern to adults
who are committed to shielding children from the materialist blandishments of
marketing and advertising. As Prout (2000) points out, following Giddens (1990,
1991), the self-realisation/control tension is characteristic of late modernity itself.
Children are society’s hope of controlling the future and therefore need protection
and control themselves through education and parenting on their way to productive
adult lives. Yet as heirs of modernity, they are entitled to participate in the process of
self-realisation through self-determination and creative choices (including those
afforded by consumption).
Advertisers’ entry into the field of media literacy education through MediaSmart®
can be seen as a move to bolster the self-realisation side of the equation, while keeping
intact the rhetoric of control (the initiative has been developed alongside a parenting
charity and with government approval) (MediaSmart® 2002). Another way of seeing it
would be as an example of advertising practitioners attempting a further “regime of
mediation”, to adopt the phrase used by Cronin (2004) who makes a convincing case
for understanding the role of advertising agencies as cultural intermediaries in multiple
regimes of mediation beyond the immediately obvious dyad of client (producer) and
consumer (market). These include mediation between themselves and their clients,
suppliers and peers, as well as intra-agency mediation between the values and priorities
of the different people involved in planning, managing, creating, producing and
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placing ads. In their separate ways, all of these acts of mediation interpret and inform
what Bourdieu calls “the art of consuming, spending and enjoying” (2000, 311, cited
Cronin 2004, 350). They can work to draw and redraw the boundaries between differ-
ent consumption categories (for example, melding food and medicine into “nutriceu-
ticals” like cholestrol-lowering yoghurts). They can also “work on reclassifying the
parameters of acceptable marketised exchange” (Cronin 2004, 365). MediaSmart® can
be read as part of a strategy to expand the parameters of marketised exchange not to
new or controversial products or services, but to new or controversial markets—in this
case children. It is part of a set of regimes of mediation, involving advertisers with
teachers and children, parents, editorial media, pressure groups and policy makers.
The interactions which result from such relationships are characterised by textual
production—of publicity material, journalism, controversial prose, interviews, web
sites, reports and political speeches. These are examples of interactive discourse—
written with specific audiences in mind, and thus guided in their verbal and rhetorical
choices by an assumed reader or receiver. They create meaning within and, crucially,
between each other through their interaction as texts (Bakhtin 1986). They are thus
part of a network of social practices (such as advertising) as well as a repository
of representations of other social practices such as consumption and being a child
(Fairclough 2001, 234). My intention in this article is to analyse a selection of such
accounts of MediaSmart® with two overall questions in mind:
● how do the available discursive representations of MediaSmart® construct children
and advertising, and in whose interests do such constructions work?
● in the light of this, what might be appropriate policy directions for regulation and
education in this area?
The contribution of the article is to offer a fresh perspective on how the subject of
advertising to children is culturally constructed. The accumulating research literature
on advertising directed at children (while ambitious to prove empirical points to
inform policy) has been accused of falling short on theoretical coherence (Friestad and
Wright 2005). Livingstone (2005) takes the view that it suffers from a fixation on the
“ideal experiment” to prove, finally, that advertising has a particular effect, isolated
from all other factors, on children. The resulting public polarisation into “pro” and
“anti” camps overlays what Livingstone detects as greater tacit consensus than the
public differences admit. The present article is not concerned with critical analysis of
academic research literature, but of a sample of part of the publicly-available discourse
which it sustains (however indirectly at times). Nevertheless, the commitment of CDA
to set such discourse within wider social practices underlines the pragmatic political
and economic framework in which the academic research is produced, and offers a
point from which to reflect on its operation.
Using Critical Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis is one of several techniques arising from the recent concentration
on language-in-use as a key to “the complexities of representation in social scientific
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Consumption, Markets and Culture 297
practice” (Smith 1998, 231). It covers a range of methods implying diverse epistemol-
ogies, activities and purposes. What unites them is a “close study of language in use”
(Taylor 2001a, 5) and an acknowledgement of language’s active role in creating
meaning. This is not to deny the existence of reality beyond language (Hall 1997a, 73).
Different discourse traditions vary in their knowledge claims, but all concur that with-
out language there can be no meaning and we cannot apprehend reality. Furthermore,
language has a social history. It is continually changing and, consequently, rearranging
the boundaries of what we can apprehend.
As a methodology, discourse analysis is beginning to make inroads into marketing
research, both academic and applied, in determining new understandings of consum-
ers and marketers. Hackley (2002, 212) lists it amongst the qualitative techniques
which advertising agencies use in their surveillance and production of consumer
culture. Elliott (1996, 1999) draws on the concept of “interpretative repertoire” in the
actively social reception of advertising by groups enacting particular discourses.
Catterall and Maclaran (2002) bring discourse analysis to bear on online consumer
ethnography. Hackley (2000) extends the approach to yield a critical understanding of
advertising agency management and, in later work, goes beyond interpersonal
discourse to draw on sources such as textbooks in an ideological critique of marketing
as an academic and professional practice (Hackley 2001, 2003).
In promoting the shaping effect of discourse on meaning (and, by extension, policy
and action) CDA does not dismiss the power of individual or group agency. Language,
and social circumstances, are dynamic, and the necessary interplay of voices in mean-
ingful language, its “dialogicality” (Bakhtin 1986), argues for the links between ideol-
ogy and language as complex and changing rather than simplistically determined.
Stuart Hall’s concept of the logic of articulation (Grossberg 1996) acknowledges
discernable links between language and social life, but sees them as flexible and capable
of severance and regrouping (disarticulation and rearticulation). CDA tends towards a
more structured account of power relations within society than this (cf. Taylor 2001b,
316) but manages to avoid oversimplification by attending to detail and complexity in
language.
Stemming from CDA’s preoccupation with power is a commitment to social change:
[CDA] is critical, first, in the sense that it seeks to discern connections between language
and other elements in social life which are often opaque … Second … in that it is commit-
ted to progressive social change, it has an emancipatory “knowledge interest” (Habermas
1971). (Fairclough 2001, 230)
The invocation of Habermas places CDA in the Western Marxist tradition of critical
theory, which balances economic determinism with the shaping effects of culture on
social life. These include what Habermas called “systematically distorted” communi-
cation (Fairclough 2001, 233). This idea has its origins in the doctrine of false
consciousness but, as Hackley (2002, 223) argues, a post-Marxist perspective holds
that “[c]onsciousness is not so much false as stifled by the continual reflection of
socially constructed consumer reality back on itself”. Analysing discourse which
constructs (and contests) children as targets of advertising, may reveal the kinds of
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distortions which govern how a debate constructed by adults reflects the social lives of
children themselves. The complicity of adults in children’s commercialisation is one
example of this, as we have noted (Cross 2002). Another tempting hypothesis is that
adults’ concern to protect children from advertising also works to protect adults from
children—both in terms of the demands that children as consumers might make on
adults, and also in terms of the child as psychoanalytic “Other”, threatening adult self-
composure from within (Hall 1997b).
Fairclough (2001, 236) proposes a template for structuring a piece of CDA moving
between the social context of an issue and its textual incarnations, as follows:
1. Selection of “a social problem in its semiotic aspect”—how a problem is repre-
sented in language.
2. Identification of obstacles to it being tackled (an explanation of its persistence,
requiring analysis not only of the resulting discourse, but of the network of
practices which accompany it).
3. Consideration of interests supporting its lack of resolution (how, for example, does
the problem support the status quo of social or economic organisation?).
4. Identification of new possibilities for resolution. In the light of stage two’s analysis,
what undiscovered possibilities are available for “solving” the problem under
investigation?
5. Critical reflection on this process.
The structure of this article will now follow the five stages outlined.
1. Advertising to Children as a Social Problem in its Semiotic Aspect
Public controversy over advertising to children has recently been given renewed
impetus in the United Kingdom by concerns over the possible contribution to child-
hood obesity of the advertising of unhealthy foods (cf. Dibb 1993; Barwise 1994;
Dalmeny, Hanna, and Lobstein 2003; Hastings et al. 2003; Paliwoda and Crawford
2003; Livingstone 2005). There is considerable political pressure for a ban on televi-
sion advertising of certain sorts of foods directed at children (Leonard 2004), in spite
of the research-based claims of advertisers that advertising plays only a marginal role
in children’s food choices (Young 2003). One of the interesting things about this
particular “social problem in its semiotic aspect” is its persistence. Not only do the
dates of some of the above citations demonstrate the reconflagration of controversy
after a ten-year interval, but many of the positions currently visible in the debate are
recognisable in the conflicts between the Federal Trade Commission and Congress
around toy advertising in the United States from the 1970s and 1980s ( Liebert and
Sprafkin 1988).
One of the problems of discourse analysis as a technique is to select a manageable
body of data with which to work which is both concise and coherent. Concentrating on
publicly available accounts of Media Smart® limits the amount of text to manageable
proportions, and provides a common point of reference, and thus a basis for compara-
bility between the available discourses. This activates the central concern of discourse
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Consumption, Markets and Culture 299
analysis: variation in how the same phenomena are presented, both within and between
texts (Potter and Wetherell 1994, 53).
In consequence, the sampling strategy began by selecting a variety of journalistic
accounts of the same verbal entity. The words “MediaSmart” and “Media Smart” as
search terms on an online news database (Lexis Nexis Executive) in December 2003, a
year into MediaSmart®’s operation, yielded 18 and 154 hits respectively. Of these only
52 referred to the actual scheme—a testament, perhaps, to the contemporary resonance
of its title. The results provided accounts from two types of journalism (trade papers
such as Marketing Week and newspapers such as the Birmingham Post and Financial
Times) and from a ministerial speech. The latter—an address to an invited audience of
UK advertising and media industry representatives by the then Minister for Culture,
Media and Sport on the occasion of the launch of MediaSmart® (Jowell 2002) has been
excluded from the present analysis in favour of a focus on non-governmental accounts.
However, political language, particularly the language of New Labour (Fairclough
2000), offers a potentially rich vein for further research in this area.
Entering the same search terms into the Google internet search engine in search of
other than journalistic accounts yielded 117 returns—the vast majority irrelevant to
MediaSmart® as a specific initiative, but picking up on the use of the words “media”
and “smart” in various combinations. However, as well as leading directly to the
MediaSmart® web site, the internet search produced examples of pressure group refer-
ences to it (from both marketing industry and food activist groups). While many of the
relevant web sites had substantial graphic content, this was ignored in an attempt to
treat the language found as if it had been from text-only databases comparable with the
data from Lexis Nexis Executive.
After repeated reading in search of regularities, sources were categorised according
to their intended audience (industry or wider public) and attitude to the initiative. A
categorisation of the sources resulting from these searches as representative of four
professional discourses is summarised in Table 1: trade and news journalism, and
industry and consumer activist groups. The extracts used as examples in the following
analysis were selected for their representativeness of their respective discourses and, in
the case of the pressure group examples, for their convergence on comparable issues.
2. Identification of Obstacles to the Problem Being Tackled
This section will briefly explore each of these discourses in turn, concentrating on the
language and rhetorical devices used to position MediaSmart® in relation to the
concepts of advertising and children, and linking this to the networks of practices in
which such positioning occurs.
Trade journalism
Trade journalism’s account of MediaSmart® is broadly affirmative of its intentions and
role in legitimising advertising to children, in line with its target readership of advertis-
ers and marketers. Yet, while the need for controversy and reportable events common
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to all journalism is evident, only one of the trade press articles in the sample (Brierley
2002) questions the principle of advertising to children. The rest collude in its natural-
isation. MediaSmart® is referred to as an “ad literacy programme” whose members
have joined forces “to educate kids about the role of advertising” (Kleinman 2003a),
and a focus for “positive efforts” by advertisers in the face of “overzealous” regulatory
proposals (Smith 2003). Trade press reports concentrate on MediaSmart®’s excep-
tional exemplification of industry solidarity (in contrast to normative competition)
and tend to be accompanied by a litany of names of backers of the scheme. The ongoing
news story is driven by the arrival of new members, for example Heinz (Kleinman
2003a) and McDonalds (Kleinman 2003b) after a lengthy hesitation which itself
provoked press comment. The following extract exemplifies a number of these aspects
of trade journalism:
In the UK, there have been active attempts at industry level to head off the threat to
marketing to children. At the end of 2002, the Chartered Institute of Marketing promoted
research showing children’s savvy when faced with ads, while the MediaSmart programme,
which is backed by Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Kellogg and Masterfoods, will send mate-
rials to schools to teach kids how to understand when they are being sold to. (Murphy
2003, 24)
The list of brand names towards the end of the second sentence acts to confirm the
programme’s credibility, depicting an industry uniting under regulatory siege (even to
the point of reconciling arch rivals Procter & Gamble and Unilever). The spatial meta-
phor of “industry level”, together with the theme of MediaSmart® as an organising core
around which hitherto disparate brands are gathered, conveys a sense of disciplined,
rational order. Here “marketing to children” is territory already occupied as of right,
from which a threat (of unspecified origin here) must be headed off. Interestingly, the
“ad literacy” focus of MediaSmart® in Kleinman (2003a), cited earlier, is softened here
Table 1 Four varieties of discourse
Discourse Texts sampled for analysis
Representative media and bodies in sample (searches of Lexis-Nexis Executive News Database and Google Search Engine, 2003)
Trade journalism Brierley (2002); Kleinman (2003a, 2003b); Smith (2003): Articles in Marketing
Irish Marketing and Advertising Journal, Marketing, Marketing Week, Brand Strategy
News journalism Swain (2002): article in The Sunday Times
BBC News Online, Belfast Telegraph, Birmingham Post, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Glasgow Herald, Guardian, Independent, Irish Times, Observer, Sunday Times, Times, Times Educational Supplement
Industry pressure groups
Palomba (2003): article in Guardian; Earnshaw (2001, 2002): speeches/papers on ISBA web site
Advertising Association (AA), Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA), Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA)
Consumer pressure groups
Dalmeny, Hanna, and Lobstein (2003): IAFCO report for WHO consultation
International Association of Consumer Food Organisations (IACFO), International Obesity Task Force (IOTF)
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Consumption, Markets and Culture 301
to “marketing to children”, incorporating both being “faced with ads” or “being sold
to”. Murphy’s acknowledgement of marketing as an integrated system including adver-
tising and selling departs (perhaps because of journalistic norms of stylistic variation,
or news objectivity) from the tendency noted by Hackley (2002, 212) in marketing
discourse for the subdivision of marketing communications activity into specialist
elements. Hackley sees this as a rhetorical strategy to present such elements as “a set of
ethically neutral technical disciplines” rather than anything more ideologically
charged. Murphy does suggest, however, that this process (“being sold to”) is discrete
enough to be isolated and explained to children while they stand aside from it, rather
than being inseparable from “an overarching category of marketing communication
that invades, shapes and reflects consumer consciousness” (Hackley 2002, 212).
Murphy positions “kids” in an institutionalised educational context: recipients of
teaching materials in schools (although there is no acknowledgement of socialisation
from other sources). Like the extract’s implied model of advertising, its model of
education as transfer (of materials to schools, of understanding to children) is one
derived from, and perpetuating, relatively unreflective commonsense. There is also a
faint hint in the lexical choice of “kids” itself that the industry is going to greater lengths
than necessary in order to demonstrate its responsibility towards already sophisticated
young consumers. Young (1990, 293) identifies the use of “kids” with a view of children
as “streetwise, amusing, interested in excitement and fast action” (as opposed to “chil-
dren” who are constructed as trusting, innocent and in need of protection), arguing
that these rival images of children underpin competing positions in debate on adver-
tising to children. Interestingly, Murphy refers to “children” at the start of the extract
(in the context of threats to marketing to them and industry research about them). The
variation in terminology suggests an aspiration to journalistic even-handedness in
reporting a controversial issue. But it also carries the subtle implication that “market-
ing to children” and marketing research about them is of a higher order of seriousness
than teaching them “to understand when they are being sold to”.
News journalism
Non-specialist news journalism, as might be expected, takes a more critical view—at
least superficially. Its discursive norms privilege telling a dramatic story and, as Alth-
eide (2002) points out, children (alongside issues like crime and immigration) are a
potent focus for “crisis” stories. Galtung and Ruge (1973) offer a classic exposition of
“news values” as a principle by which the discourse of news recognises some phenom-
ena while ignoring others, a literal example of power creating knowledge. Conflict and
controversy are high on their list of relevant criteria, and the emotive potential of the
subject of advertising and children makes the subject an attractive one for feature writ-
ers. An account of MediaSmart®’s launch in the Sunday Times (Swain 2002) includes a
disapproving preamble covering market research aimed at very young children, the
growth in media reaching children beyond their parents’ control, and the burgeoning
economic power of children as consumers. Given the tendency of the consumer press
to associate power with consumers, MediaSmart® itself is positioned as a response by
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advertisers to an increasingly hostile parental environment (rather than the political
environment indicated by the trade press). While this makes the narrative more
dramatic, and flatters the agentive powers of its readers, it plays down the sense of a
structural economic and cultural conflict:
Concern centres on the feeling that children are being shaped by powerful influences over
which parents have no control, that they are growing up too fast and too materialistic, and
are only able to express themselves or fit in with their friends through the things they
possess.
However, the marketing industry is becoming increasingly sensitive to accusations that it
is exploiting youngsters. In response, a group of companies, including Cadbury and
Kellogg, have co-operated with the government to launch MediaSmart, a campaign to
teach 6 to 11-year-olds how advertising works. (Swain 2002, 16)
This extract acts as something of a fulcrum in the article (as the narrative locus shifts
from children to industry). To this point the journalist has portrayed children as child
labourers paid from an early age to attend focus groups, recipients of targeted market-
ing beyond their parents’ control, and victims of a siege of “more advertising during
children’s television programmes than any other children in Europe”. Where it appears
in the story, MediaSmart® dispels some of this tension for the reader by resetting the
advertiser/child balance. After the conflicts and tensions implied in the lists of concerns
for children, the initiative introduces collaboration and consensus between brand-
names and government (whose vision of democratic participation, of course, includes
focus groups and brand revivals). Yet the choice of the word “campaign” here hints at
ambivalence. In one sense it paints MediaSmart® as morally energetic in resolving
tensions. In another it is yet more organised aggression from the big guns of advertis-
ing. On whose behalf is this campaign being waged, and against what? Interestingly,
Swain’s exposition of the purpose of the “campaign” comes not in her own words but
as an extended quotation from the chairman of MediaSmart®, Paul Jackson, who
describes it as “enlightened self-interest”—an expression which captures something of
the circularity of resolving concerns about advertising to children by having advertisers
teaching children about advertising.
The way the article constructs advertising depends largely on this authoritative
interview—whereby the journalist effectively hands over to an expert voice in an effort
to neutralise the disturbing images and tensions from the article’s earlier section. It
finishes with the following paragraph quoted as direct speech:
Children understand the difference between advertising and programming from an early
age, but they don’t understand the promotional principle: that advertising is there to sell.
MediaSmart will teach them what is an advert, what is a brand, why people advertise. It is
about critical thinking and critical viewing.
If you help children learn how to choose, they grow up with a life skill that will make them
feel more comfortable in this commercial world. (Jackson, quoted in Swain 2002, 16)
Instead of something whose workings can be taught to six to eleven-year-olds,
advertising appears here as rather more complex. Mr Jackson’s focus widens from
the mechanics of an individual ad to the broader processes of branding, economic
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rationale, criticality and choice. Again, this might seem to run counter to the market-
ing communications industry’s tendency to divide itself into ethically neutral technical
disciplines, but here it has the purpose of taking the pressure off advertising in isola-
tion by flagging MediaSmart® as “a non-profit media literacy programme for UK
primary school children, initially focused on advertising”. Interestingly, its Canadian
precursor, Concerned Children’s Advertisers, has gone even further in this direction,
proclaiming its mission as “Giving Canadian Children Tools to be Media and Life
Wise” and adopting a recent focus on anti-bullying (Concerned Children’s Advertisers
2003).
Swain’s article casts children in a number of roles, ranging from victims to rampant
consumers. Its title, “Pester Power”, invokes a term which, originally given currency by
the ad industry, has rebounded on it (Earnshaw 2001). MediaSmart®’s purpose of
making children “feel more comfortable in this commercial world” suggests a project
of socialisation of “natural” children into consuming adults. Jackson’s phrase strikes an
ironic parallel with parents’ concerns earlier in the article about their children’s trans-
formation from their “natural” selves into consumers who can only express themselves
or relate to others through material possessions. Jackson appears to be confirming this.
His educational materials may reconcile children (and their parents) to consumerism,
but will do nothing to challenge it. In fact MediaSmart® might be more accurately seen
as aimed at consumer socialisation rather than media literacy, a rather less disinterested
aim for industry. As Hackley observes: “[c]orporations are served better where humans
are socialized into consumption at an early age” (2002, 224). While this critique may
be implicit in the article, the conventional news-feature structure of controversy
followed by resolution does not allow its exposition. Instead, the article ends by tacitly
endorsing the industry line on consumer socialisation. It is hardly to be expected that,
beyond exciting readers’ concerns as part of a dramatic story, mainstream journalism
will attempt to radicalise readers in a way which might prompt the resolution of a social
problem through generating unconventional insights.
Industry pressure groups
Marketing and advertising industry pressure groups are clearly committed to the
perpetuation of advertising to children. Sources here include MediaSmart® itself
through its web site and publications. As we have noted, it describes itself as “a non-
profit media literacy programme”. The lexical choice “media literacy” is a key source
of variation in this discourse in the way that it positions its subjects of children and
citizens. The phrase is a relatively recent coinage in Europe (Higham 2002), but
Taylor (2003) points to its use in North America for over two decades. Its adoption in
industry pressure group discourse seeks to align MediaSmart® with a contemporary
international agenda of citizenship education. As Taylor (2003) points out, the imme-
diate stimulus for its currency appears to be concern about the unprecedented
contemporary media saturation of children. MediaSmart® web site’s “Media Literacy/
What is it?” section begins with a 1991 Department of Culture, Media and Sport
(DCMS) definition of media literacy, and refers to the Council of Europe’s definition
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of media competence. The implication is that in a deregulated, market-based global
economy, protection for citizens depends on their developing individual consumer
skills rather than being a government responsibility.
Significantly, the DCMS definition cited is focused exclusively on reception skills,
defining media literacy as the ability:
to appraise critically, and assess the relative value of, information from different sources,
and gain competencies in understanding the construction, forms, strengths and limitations
of screen based content. (DCMS 2001)
Livingstone with Thumin (2003, 2) broaden this definition considerably, adopting a
working definition which, after stressing the a priori importance of access to media in
developing any level of literacy whatsoever, places critical reception skills between two
other key elements: technical competence and the ability to produce content. This
embodies a far more active conception of citizen/consumers than does the DCMS
definition. Here, they are envisaged as emancipated communicators with something
to say, rather than critical, but essentially passive, receivers. Furthermore, Livingstone
with Thumin stress that adults are as much in need of media literacy skills as are chil-
dren, in spite of the almost exclusive focus of policy discourse on the latter. As well as
revealing the way in which MediaSmart® (and, for that matter, the UK’s Department
of Culture, Media and Sport) limit their construction of consumers, this highlights
two other deficiencies in the industry pressure-group discourse. First, the industry
takes the issue of access for granted—whereas the real market suffers from inequalities,
and thus the uneven distribution of vulnerability (some citizens, whatever their ages,
are better placed than others to cope with advertising). Secondly, it questions the abil-
ity of adults (as much as children) to manage whatever the promotional industry
throws them—whereas current media policy assumes their complete competence (and
thus responsibility) from age eighteen onwards within the law.
Responsibility is an important site of variation in conflicting discourses on advertis-
ing and children. Departing from the view of parents as legitimately anxious about the
onslaught of marketing on their children (Swain 2002), Palomba (2003), writing on
behalf of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (the pressure group representing
UK advertising agencies) argues that the industry is already doing more than enough
to protect vulnerable consumers:
Television advertisements are already vetted in advance of broadcast in the UK, as called
for by the International Association of Consumer Food Organisations in its recent inter-
national report. The industry also already embraces the need to educate children about the
media and of its own initiative has set up a project called MediaSmart to tackle this issue.
(Palomba 2003, 7)
MediaSmart® is constructed here as a “project”—a voluntary provision to address
an emerging need. There is no sense of forestalling legislation (as in the journalistic
discourses). The word “tackle” has warmth (from its sporting associations), a positive
move in contrast to the redundant and ill-informed negativity of the named consumer
pressure group. The energetic sweep of the article draws in the common reader by its
use of the first person plural: “Advertising provides us all with information … the fact
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Consumption, Markets and Culture 305
is that most of us enjoy the odd hamburger … we all know what became of the US
prohibition laws”. Irresponsible parents, “some” consumer groups, “some” politicians,
are positioned outside this consensus. Advertising is constructed as an informational
service to society. It is not even mentioned in connection with MediaSmart®, whose
remit is to educate children about “the media”.
Palomba portrays advertising as the provision of information and choice to respon-
sible consumers, rather than the artful management of consumption through actively
understanding and engineering consumer demand. Given the UK’s relatively liberal
regulatory regime, this construction of consumer responsibility is clearly an important
rhetorical defence of the “freedom” to advertise—even though the freedom of infor-
mation and choice on which it is premised applies unevenly across social groups
according to their education, opportunity and resources. All, on the other hand, rich
or poor, savvy or naive, adult or child, are capable of generating profits given the
appropriate marketing approach.
Consumer pressure groups
Consumer groups share the industry’s concern to fix responsibility—but with adver-
tisers rather than children and parents. They too press science and experts into
service with footnotes and academic references, in the service of condemning adver-
tising to children. They often represent a concerted resistance to prevailing forms of
economic and social organisation on a wider front. Their very names are a rhetorical
resource, tending to emphasise consensus, international alliance and official-sound-
ing organisational forms such as “Council” or “Commission”. The “recent interna-
tional report” from the IACFO mentioned by Palomba (2003) is subtitled “A report
by the International Association of Consumer Food Organizations for the World
Health Organization consultation on a global strategy for diet and health”. The prep-
osition “for” linking IACFO with WHO might be read as hinting at some kind of
client/supplier relationship rather than the response of one among many organisa-
tions to a public consultation.
As well as having a dialogical relationship to Palomba (2003), IAFCO’s report has
influenced thinking by the leading UK charity, The Children’s Society (Reitemeier
2004). The report dismisses MediaSmart® as ineffective:
In the UK, a “media literacy” project called MediaSmart (funded largely by the advertising
and food industries) does not treat food advertising as a distinct subject, nor does it tackle
media literacy with regard to interpreting nutritional and health claims. It is designed for
6–11 year olds, although marketing is also targeted at pre-school children. (Dalmeny,
Hanna and Lobstein 2003, 28)
Unfortunately, there appears to be little or no evaluation of whether media literacy
programmes have any positive impact on children’s food choices.
This treatment undermines MediaSmart®’s mission to educate children in
consumer skills by pointing out that pre-school children are also target customers—an
unappetising consideration even for those who defend advertising to older children on
the grounds of their cognitive development (cf. Young 1990). The framing of the key
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phrase “media literacy” with inverted commas implies scepticism, and its effectiveness
is explicitly challenged. Finally, the footnote is used to barbed rhetorical effect—a
device associated with academic conventions revealing the presiding authority behind
the scheme as no more intellectually-respectable than a PR company.
Advertising here is constructed as cynically manipulative, children as soft targets.
Compared with the industry’s breezy polemic (Palomba 2003) the tone is dourly
serious. It pours scorn on the good faith of the advertising industry by relating the
inadequacies of MediaSmart® specifically to current, international, concerns about
childhood obesity. This contrasts with the less circumscribed goal of “media literacy”
espoused by MediaSmart®. Thus the single-issue negativity of the consumer pressure
group’s discourse is a telling rhetorical move against the less clearly focused position of
the industry.
For the industry, Earnshaw (2001) questions the validity of what he calls “consum-
erists purporting to represent the real consumer”. But as Worcester (2002) reveals,
“real” consumers in the UK include a significant number of activists in their ranks—
with claimed rates of participation in boycotts and action groups at 24% and 18%
respectively. Thus the scepticism of consumer pressure group discourse has a social
grounding which the advertising and marketing industry needs to take seriously.
Jenkins (1992) has demonstrated that campaigners in the UK on a range of issues
from pornography to violence have exercised a “politics of substitution” to reprofile
their causes in terms of the threat offered to children (making it difficult for oppo-
nents to disagree with them). Similarly, consumer activists whose central concern is to
reduce what they see as the anti-democratic power of capitalism, have an interest
in casting their campaigning spotlight on advertising to children, compromising
MediaSmart®’s claim to being a positive move by the industry. They need the prob-
lem of advertising to children as a rhetorical resource, quite apart from any scepticism
they might reasonably harbour about the sincerity of the initiative.
3. Consideration of Interests Supporting the Lack of Resolution of the Problem
The positions mapped in the preceding discussion are summarised in Table 2.
As can be deduced from this summary, the social “problem” of advertising to chil-
dren serves practical interests for each discourse. This addresses the first research ques-
tion posed earlier—in whose interests do the available constructions of children and
advertising around MediaSmart® work? In summary, they work in the service of the
social practices from which they originate, as follows:
● in the case of the trade and consumer press: advancing the news agenda and jour-
nalistic convention. For consumer journalism the issue of advertising to children has
the characteristics of an excellent news story. It has wide relevance to readers’ expe-
rience, it builds on and elaborates their world-view (acting as a focus for intergen-
erational concerns and anxieties about corporate power), it is emotive and involving.
As an aspect of this story, MediaSmart® is one of a series of “angles” or perspectives
which hint both at its inexhaustibility as a topic and at its open-endedness as an issue.
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Consumption, Markets and Culture 307
The wider implications of children being socialised as consumers (a process at least
as much in the interests of advertisers as of children) are not explored. As a subject,
MediaSmart® thus allows journalists “to exercise the media’s most general function
of reworking ideology and maintaining the status quo” (Curran and Seaton 1991,
Table 2 Summary of discursive positions around MediaSmart®
Topic Trade journalism News journalismIndustry pressure groups
Consumer pressure groups
MediaSmart® Industry news event—exceptional for its collaborative nature, but revelatory of participating companies’ strategy in a difficult political area.
An initiative from an industry under pressure from parents concerned about the exploitation and manipulation of their children.
A voluntary project to enhance consumer skills, citizenship and media literacy. A showcase for industry solidarity and corporate social responsibility.
A tokenistic and inadequate gesture to preclude effective legislation against advertising practices which harm children’s long term health.
Children Kids—“savvy” but passive.
Focus of parental and social concerns, incongruous targets for marketing industry.
Naturally-developing consumers, agentive and receptive to learning.
An easy target for advertisers (who start with pre-schoolers). At avoidable risk.
Advertising A natural activity—taken for granted by readership. Persuasive, with some information.
A potentially controversial activity which needs regulation. Persuasive.
A right, to be exercised responsibly. Persuasive but mainly informative.
A source of oppressive economic and social power, persuasive and manipulative. Needs strong regulation.
The problem The industry’s attempt to “head off the threat to marketing to children”.
The challenge to conventional relations between parents (readers) and their children, and the threat to their well-being.
Increasing hostility to advertising from legislators and media based on ignorance and prejudice, heralding the danger of inappropriate regulation.
The proliferation of accepted economic practices which both exploit and endanger children (and other citizens).
Institutional drivers
Journalistic conventions within the press addressing a niche industry.
Journalistic conventions within the consumer press.
Economic interests in the production and consumption of goods and services by children.
A focus for consumer resistance to advertising and marketing through NGOs and activist groups.
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308 T. O’Sullivan
273). For the trade press, MediaSmart® also has emotional resonance with readers—
as an episode in the unfolding narrative of hostilities between industry and regula-
tory bodies. Even those not directly involved in advertising to children may see it as
a straw in the wind for future policy on a wider scale. An implication of this account
of opposing interests is the reinforcement of the perceived separation between the
realms of production and consumption, seen by Cronin (2004, 359) as one of
the ways in which advertising practitioners themselves legitimate their existence to
clients.
● in the case of industry pressure groups: the positioning of consumers (including
consumers-in-training) as informed, responsible yet needy choosers whose free-
doms would be limited by further regulation. As we have seen, this positioning
draws on a network of political and commercial doctrines around media literacy,
about individual responsibility and the receding role of the state in an increasingly
complex media environment (or “market” in policy terms). While amplifying the
agentive nature of consumers, it simultaneously appears to limit the prospect of
their active participation in public communication through its partial definition of
media literacy. In the time-honoured paradox of consumer sovereignty they are
free to make informed and responsible choices, but their options are limited by the
structure and extent of what is made available (Smith 1990). Furthermore, even
responsible consumers must also be seen to have needs which can only be met
effectively through products and services supplied by advertisers. These appear to
include the need of children for media literacy on advertisers’ terms. MediaS-
mart®’s presentation by the advertising industry as a pledge of its social responsi-
bility is a very high-risk strategy given the semiotic power of childhood as an
image, compared to its contestability as a concept. We have observed earlier in the
present article how different views of childhood (“kids” versus “children”) are
appropriated by rival camps as central to their rhetorical positions (Young 1990).
But the advertising industry’s ways of knowing about and communicating child-
hood are always likely to appear less authentic and less disinterested than those of
educators or consumer groups who can claim to have the welfare of children,
rather than shareholders, at heart.
● in the case of consumer pressure groups: a focus for scepticism and the provision of
a powerful rhetorical resource. Anxieties about the social and economic conse-
quences of globalising corporations have found articulation in a number of popular
texts (cf. Klein 2000; Hertz 2002; Stiglitz 2002) and practical expression in a range of
activities from violent demonstrations to ethical consumerism (Harrison, Newholm,
and Shaw 2005). MediaSmart® provides a focus for the elaboration of concerns
which, while immediately focused on the issue of advertising to children and its
suspected role in fostering obesity, nevertheless draw on wider disquiet about the
power of commercial interests in contemporary culture. Industry advocates such as
Earnshaw (2002) may dismiss such disquiet as fomented by “balaclava bolshies”
rather than “the real consumer”. Yet it represents part of the contemporary zeitgeist
which advertising and marketing ignore at their peril, and whose actual influence
on the consumer landscape can be seen in, for example, the rapid growth of
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Consumption, Markets and Culture 309
the “organic” food sector in the UK, much of which has by-passed the established
infrastructure of advertising and marketing (Lawrence 2005).
4. Identification of New Possibilities for Resolving the Problem
The answer to the second research question posed earlier, about appropriate policy in
the light of this analysis, is inevitably provisional in an article of this length. However,
one promising direction is pointed out by Zelizer (2002) who emphasises that the
usual questions about children as consumers are framed from the perspective of the
adult world. She argues that seeing engagement with the commercial world from a
child’s point of view reveals significant aspects of it which are obscured by the adult
emphasis on consumption (whether around socialisation into it or protection from
it). Children’s lives, she contends, are layered with production and distribution
activities—both inside and outside the home—which involve them in commercial
relations of informal work, various exchanges (monetary and/or barter), and gift-
giving. Furthermore all such practices are closely connected to wider patterns of
consumption within the family (particularly by parents), a point which can be over-
looked by analyses concentrating on whether (or how) advertisers produce consump-
tion in children (Martens, Southerton, and Scott 2004). Brief as has been our
examination of them, none of the competing discourses we have surveyed admits in
any detail of the way in which children experience consumption or advertising in
practice or how it fits into their lived culture.
If they did, there might be considerably less concentration on the iconic medium
of television advertising (fast being supplanted by other media in the way children
connect to the world), and considerably more emphasis on the varieties of commer-
cial experience in which children participate at different ages and in different
settings. How does this contribute, for example, to the tacit marketing expertise with
which they approach exchanges and evaluate offers? Children themselves are
conspicuously absent from the discourses surveyed here—in spite of the fact that
MediaSmart® exists precisely to provide educational resources which might be
expected to stimulate debates inside and outside the classroom. It may be unremark-
able in a research paper to call for more research, but an important unrealised possi-
bility for solving the “problem” of advertising to children would be to refocus the
research agenda on children’s, rather than adults’, perspectives (cf. Lewis and Lindsay
2000; Preston 2000).
A related issue is policy on the focus and scope of media literacy education. By its
very nature, MediaSmart® perpetuates the orientation of this towards children, in spite
of the gaps in adult competence noted by Livingstone, and restricts its definition of
literacy to passive reception rather than active, and perhaps troublesome, production.
This view remains unchallenged by any of the accounts of MediaSmart® we have
analysed, and, as has been noted, it coincides with the governmental media agenda
prevailing in the UK at the time of the programme’s launch. However, there is some
evidence of a development in policy here. The UK communications regulator, Ofcom,
following a period of consultation, now defines media literacy (for whose promotion it
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has a statutory responsibility from Section 11 of the 2003 Communications Act) as “the
ability to access, understand and create communications in a variety of contexts”
(Ofcom 2005). The last element here, creating communications, represents an advance
from the 2003 legislation which saw Ofcom come into being. It reflects, to some extent,
the enormous recent growth in opportunities for consumers (particularly young
consumers) to create and publish audiovisual material on the web—a phenomenon
which has even caught broadband internet service providers unawares because of their
technical emphasis on downloading rather than uploading facilities (Economist 2006).
Ofcom’s stated strategy and priorities for fulfilling its responsibility continue to
emphasise reception skills targeted on children (Ofcom 2005). But the very act of
naming the creation of communication among the elements of media literacy opens
the way for a more active, participative, model of the empowered citizen/consumer,
whether adult or child, of which advertisers and regulators need to take cognisance.
5. Reflection on the Process
Qualitative methods cannot claim to produce universal or value-free knowledge, but
they can claim to generate valuable and relevant insights capable of further develop-
ment. While it is possible to envisage CDA within a positivist framework, the evidence
drawn on in this study has been selected purposively, and analysed qualitatively to illu-
minate what, for the researcher, are key themes in accounts of a particular industry.
Different researchers might take different views of the boundaries, or number, of
discourses evident. Clearly, too, interpretation of language in use will evoke different
responses in different readers. On the other hand, the study has been careful to support
its argument with appropriate exemplification and reference to the wider literature, so
can lay some claim to replicability and overall coherence.
An arguable limitation of CDA in this context is its debt to critical theory, and its
resulting tendency towards the logic of mediation (expecting the direct determination
of sociocultural phenomena, such as consumption, by economic forces). This para-
digm has long since given way to an “active” construction of the consumer in marketing
literature. Children as consumers are included in this, but (as noted in the Introduction
to the present article) the balance of autonomy and vulnerability with which they are
credited creates a troubling tension (Prout 2000). CDA’s commitment to progressive
social change on their behalf is thus rendered problematic. Instead of the structural
oppression at which critical theory railed, power relations in society are now seen as less
hierarchical (if no less potent). Van Dijk (1993, 256) comments on the complexity of
“co-produced dominance”, in which vulnerable groups become complicit in their
own domination. In the absence of clear “victims and villains” he looks to CDA to
explore the intricacies of power relationships, in a way which approaches Foucault’s
concept of the circulation of power as a productive force (Foucault 1977; Hall 1997a,
77). A fruitful avenue of future research would be to apply CDA to children’s own
discourses around advertising and consumption in order to map such intricacies,
building on the work that has already been done on young people’s use of advertising
(e.g. Ritson and Elliott 1999).
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Consumption, Markets and Culture 311
Part of the attraction of CDA is its acknowledgement of the practical consequences
of power rather than the floating moral relativism of which post-modern social analysis
(including Foucauldian analysis) has been accused (cf. Gillies and Alldred 2002).
Debates about advertising to children have consequences on behaviour and policy. The
conclusions here are that they should include children’s perspectives more fully, and
replace the “deficit” model of children with a broadened media literacy agenda to
comprehend a more participatory view of consumer/citizens, whatever their age.
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