Advertising that takes aim at media-savvy youngsters

If you spend your childhood in Greece, chances are you will never see an advertisement on national television for a toy. If you live in Sweden, you can plant yourself in front of children's TV all day and never see an ad directed at you.

In Denmark, you might see an ad aimed at you and your pocket money, but you won't see it in ad breaks during children's television. That's because advertising to children is strictly controlled in these European countries.

Contrast that with the situation in Ireland, especially now in the run-up to Christmas. Ad breaks are crammed with wall-to-wall advertising for the latest high-priced "batteries not included" toy. And if the ads are not selling toys, they're trying to persuade children to use their considerable influence over whoever does the supermarket shop in the house to buy this brand of cereal or that make of yoghurt.

While all this is going on, hundreds of thousands of pounds are spent every year in research projects that aim to discover whether young people are influenced by advertising. This month alone the results of two such research projects made it into the newspapers. Both were conducted in Britain, and the two of them came up with polar opposite opinions: one said advertising has no great effect on children; the other said that ads might have more power over children than their parents do.

The truth, as is often the case when research conflicts, is likely to be somewhere in the middle.

Certainly children and young people are more media-savvy now than ever before. Teenagers know a great deal about brands and the marketing strategies that go with them. They know, for example, that companies don't sponsor football teams because they like sport, and that athletes don't wear a certain type of trainer because they fit well or they like the colour. It's all about getting the brand name out there in front of likely consumers.

But the knowledge that young people are clued into the ways of marketing doesn't make manufacturers and brandbuilders stop advertising to young people; it simply demands that they are cleverer in the way that they do it.

Take the current television advertisement for Lucozade. A guy playing with his computer game takes a break and hits the pause button. While he's out of the room the characters in the game move, chat to each other and drink a Lucozade. At no time during the ad will you hear a voiceover saying that Lucozade is cool and if you drink it you'll be hip, because the manufacturers know that no self-respecting media-savvy teenager is going to buy that direct message.

But that's exactly what the ad is "saying" by having its main character playing a computer game and by using a cult cyber character. That the ad is funny increases the attraction.

It is advertising like this that has transformed the Lucozade brand from being a something that was a drink only for sick people to a cool street drink that's a serious competitor for Coke and Pepsi.

High on the wish list of hundreds of thousands of teenagers this Christmas is a Sony PlayStation 2 - and the product is still not in the shops. Even when it does come in from Japan, the waiting list for units is now so long that most would-be owners will have to wait until well after Christmas until they get one.

Some £20 million will be spent on advertising and marketing the console, and only some of it will be spent on traditional television advertising. The rest will be spent on an underground marketing campaign that includes leaving postcards and Polaroids in hairdressers and night-club toilets, taking out ads in small circulation, hyper-trendy magazines and creating a spoof website (youarecoolwearecool.com). There has also been a glitzy media launch that resulted in hundreds of free column inches of hype. In addition to this, the scarcity of the PlayStation 2 units means that TV and radio programmes are queuing up to give them away as competition prizes.

It is these sorts of marketing tactics that helped the first Playstation become the marketing phenomenen that it did. When Sony first launched it console five years ago they had to create a market for their product, and break the association between playing computer games and being a nerdy teenager; there are lots of nerdy teenagers, to be sure, but certainly not enough to build a cool mega brand.

Ten years ago a survey by Britain's Food Commission found that young children would choose Tony the Tiger or Ronald McDonald as a companion for a day out - in preference to their parents. The survey published last week by the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) in Britain came up with similar findings. It discovered that 36 per cent of adult consumers believed that advertising is the biggest influence on children, while only 17 per cent believed that parents have the most power. Peer pressure was believed to be slightly more persuasive than advertising, with 37 per cent of respondents saying that friends are the most influential factor.

Sweden takes over the presidency of the EU in January, and since that country has the strictest laws governing advertising and children in Europe it is expected that the Swedes will use their term of office to introduce new Euro-wide legislation concerning children and advertising. Even if no legislation actually goes through, Sweden's time in the EU presidency will almost certainly raise the awareness of the subject and cause intense debate. In Ireland, as in the rest of Europe, advertising is a self-regulating industry and there are codes of conduct which include rules governing children and advertising. However, in Ireland, they mostly centre on how children can be used in advertisements - that is, as performers.

In Sweden, no television advertising can be directed at children under 12 - whether it's an ad for a toy or a breakfast cereal. Supporters of similar bans - or, at the very least, heavy restriction - say that it helps reduce rampant consumerism in the young and minimises "pester power".

Opponents of such tough regulation argue that very young children can't differentiate between advertisements and programmes; that teenagers are so media-savvy that they can't be sold anything they don't want; and, anyway, without advertisements television stations won't be able to fund the making of children's programmes.

While the debate rages on and new rules are considered to control advertising, it's worth remembering that there hasn't been a television advertisement for one of the biggest marketing successes of the end of the 20th century - Pokemon cards. They caught on as a spin-off from an obscure Japanese cartoon and peer pressure did the rest. That sort of influence is now called "viral marketing" - and a virus is almost impossible to cure.