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This article was downloaded by: [Akdeniz Universitesi] On: 21 December 2014, At: 00:43 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Consumption Markets & Culture Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcmc20 Get MediaSmart®: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Controversy Around Advertising to Children in the UK Terry O'Sullivan Published online: 20 Aug 2007. To cite this article: Terry O'Sullivan (2007) Get MediaSmart®: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Controversy Around Advertising to Children in the UK, Consumption Markets & Culture, 10:3, 293-314, DOI: 10.1080/10253860701365397 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10253860701365397 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions

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Page 1: Get MediaSmart®: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Controversy Around Advertising to Children in the UK

This article was downloaded by: [Akdeniz Universitesi]On: 21 December 2014, At: 00:43Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Consumption Markets & CulturePublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcmc20

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

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10253860701365397

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Get MediaSmart®: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Controversy Around Advertising to Children in the UK

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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294 T. O’Sullivan

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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296 T. O’Sullivan

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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298 T. O’Sullivan

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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300 T. O’Sullivan

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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Consumption, Markets and Culture 303

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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306 T. O’Sullivan

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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310 T. O’Sullivan

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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