Impressionable or impossible

(Article I wrote for a Marketing Journal in 2010)

The vivid world of innovated advertising has more side effects than any other considerable good effect.

How many times have you wondered and compared a character form your favourite movie to a real person you know in your personal life.

If as an adult you tend to get influenced by powerful and easily accessible audio visual media surrounding you in many of its avatars like YouTube on the internet, hundreds of channels on television Out Of Home (OOH) video screens and of course movies .  The power of the media in question is more potent than what it was originally created for.  The use of audio visual media was solely for entertainment when Auguste and Louis Lumière created their very first moving images in 1895.  Information during that time when presented had enormous direct and indirect effect on people watching the moving images.  Even today the impact is same but at different levels.

It’s a known fact that kids have impressionable minds and hence their learning curve is ascending all the time.  This is the age where their near and far future is formulated.  Their minds want to learn and understand everything they see and comprehend.  This human urge to know things the way they are becomes easy with audio visual media since more than 90% of human senses depend on eyes and ears.  There has been a study conducted by WHO (World Health Organisation) which states that Children enter the consumerism circle and continue to stay like that as soon as they are exposed to audio visual advertising (Marketing of Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages to Children, Report of a WHO Forum and Technical Meeting, Oslo, Norway, 2-5 May 2006).

To prove the same Pizza Hut spent approximately $US 2.5 million on television advertising in India (Exchange for Media, 2004).  This kind of advertising is not only for sales and high recall in target audience, but it is definitely for the upbringing of the name of the corporate that is behind product.  They use different techniques to do so starting from innovation till using a celebrity to endorse the product.  .  LODESTAR attributed PepsiCo’s higher recognition status in India, than Coca-Cola, to its long established association with the nation’s passion, cricket. Endorsement by famous cricketers and its high visibility at matches appears to be more effective than Coca-Cola’s greater TV advertising spend (LODESTAR, 2002 in “The extent, nature and effects of food promotion to children: a review of the evidence to December 2008” / by Georgina Cairns, Kathryn Angus and Gerard Hastings.).

We all know how the dog in Hutch ad and the cute girl who took the brand from being a corporate know all use all brand to anyone’s phone number.  Such branding activities are most of the time targeted at kids, teens and tweens since they are the decision influencers in any home.  All of us would have gone through the pressure excreted by our kids when we go out on a stroll and we pass by a toy store and they start either creating a scene or innovatively demand what they want.  When asked to list, unprompted, three recalled adverts, the adverts most frequently recalled by children were for noodles, biscuits, soft drinks and chocolates. Children showed higher levels of advertising recall than adults for all the four products except noodles. Parents reported ‘child’s demand’ for the product was a substantial influence on buying decisions for several categories of food product (The extent, nature and effects of food promotion to children: a review of the evidence to December 2008 / by Georgina Cairns, Kathryn Angus and Gerard Hastings.)

Once the medium and the message set the other important thing all corporate think of is innovation in their product.  We have seen this being used in India massively since the huge market of India is like an ice cream kept in front of a kid.  The corporate go great length to innovate for Indian markets since it’s a different ball game compared to other countries and continents.  You cannot sell one idea from any other country in India.  It’s unique to every square mile and the need to innovate will determine the survival of a product in India.  We can see with example of pizza hut how much innovation is actually necessary for success and how much research and development each company does before hitting the Indian mass markets.  Pizza Hut, the world’s largest pizza chain with over 12,500 restaurants across 91 countries first entered India in 1996. More vegetarian 22 pizza recipes were developed and a number of vegetarian-only outlets opened, the only ones in the world (The extent, nature and effects of food promotion to children: a review of the evidence to December 2008 / by Georgina Cairns, Kathryn Angus and Gerard Hastings.).

With gradual growth of advertising aimed at children specially of the food sector of FMCG products which contain 86% of advertising on Indian television (Exchange for Media Report 2009) there is a growing concern over the health industry about adverse effects of bad eating habits in kids expressed in the World Health Organisation’s Evidence update (The extent, nature and effects of food promotion to children: a review of the evidence to December 2008 / by Georgina Cairns, Kathryn Angus and Gerard Hastings.) and also in the extensive report published by Indian Institute of Management, Khozikode (Impact of Advertising on Children’s Health by Anand Nawathe, Rohan Gawande & Sudhir Dethe during International Marketing Conference on Marketing & Society, 8-10 April, 2007, Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode).  They make astounding statements with their extensive survey that More than 60% of commercials promote sugared cereals, candy, fatty foods and toys.  This means unhealthy eating habits being encouraged without knowledge of parents.  Ethical and Social Advertising are the need of the day today.  There needs to be drastic steps to avoid such rampant unregulated advertising.  I would like to end the article with sighting of the rules and regulations from Sweden and Norway, TV advertising and sponsorship of programmes aimed at children below the age of 12 is prohibited. In Greece, the advertising of toys on television is banned between7.00 a.m. and 10.00 p.m.

India should wake up to the realities of the world of socially responsible advertising with immediate effect hand get few strong regulations to curb and control such adverse advertising.  Make the media more user friendly with regulations which are of benefit to both the media as well as the manufacturing corporate.