Business

Spike The Punchline

Are ads with kids in adult situations morally indefensible good business?

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Spike The Punchline
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“Pervert”, “sleazy”, “hypocrite”, “naive”, “obscene”—just a small sample of the A-rated accusations flying thick and fast between advertising heavyweights. For Indian advertisers, who spend as much as Rs 20,000 crore a year, “pester power”, the alleged ability of kids to dictate what the family buys, is a shiny new toy they all use—in the hope they will be remembered by the family member with the longest brand memory.

So, it’s a little surprising that a handful of recent television campaigns featuring youngsters—ages roughly 11 to 16 years—has raised hackles in the industry and the blogosphere, with anxious parents and TV-watchers angrily tuning in too.

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There is an uproar over Vodafone’s recent campaign featuring the coveted pug. This time, the dog keeps an adult from intruding upon two pre-teens chatting. The new campaign from Flipkart, the online bookstore, also has critics: little children playing dress-up is cute, but momentarily ogling a little girl is inappropriate, they say. A Cadbury’s milk chocolate advertisement is being accused of sexual mimicry too, though all the featured teens do is messily eat chocolate.

Anand Halve, co-founder, Chlorophyll brand consultancy, says in an online post: “Several recent tvcs depict pre-puberty youngsters engaged in quasi-sexual activities. Their creators seem almost Nabokovian in their obsession with pre-pubescent youngsters. I wonder if they feel any remorse about how many childhoods they may be robbing?”

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Lakshmipathy Bhat, vice-president, DraftFCB+ULKA, Bangalore, who has also turned a critical eye to the trend online, says, “At a time when parents are trying to fend off a deluge of communication they can’t really control, the advertising industry has to take a part of the blame for portraying children as ‘mature’.” At the same time, Bhat says, the mass media can’t be asked to stop and fingers can’t be pointed at it in isolation. His stance has drawn his readers’ ire, with some calling him a hypocrite, naive, and so on.

“Enough already with the ‘children being sexualised’, and ‘children being exploited, I didn’t see anything but innocence in that advert,” says ad filmmaker Alyque Padamsee on the Vodafone spot. “And the Flipkart campaign is meant to be fun. Besides, they are not meant for children. It is a bookstore after all.”

Most advertisers agree there is nothing wrong with featuring children in ads, especially when promoting products geared towards them—chocolate, for instance. They also agree that it’s below-the-belt to use pester power beyond a point, say to advertise furniture or linen. But what about book ads? Or a mobile-service network? Are there hard-and-fast rules for featuring children in them?

Sure, rules exist. But times have changed, even more so for the cosseted Indian youngster. In 2004, what India called pester power referred to children demanding what they wanted for their personal consumption. In 2012, kids are integral to the major purchasing decisions their families make—cars, cell phones, even homes. “It is not pester power today, it’s consumption clout,” says Madhurima Bhatia, head of media engagement with market research agency, IPSOS India.

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And so, as Shubhranshu Das, executive director with IPSOS, says, advertising cannot do without children and commercials play on insight into how kids articulate needs. In Flipkart’s ad, when the two boys stop talking to ogle a dolled-up girl, an invisible line may have been crossed.

“It is a fine line between a child acting like an adult and a child behaving like one. The advertiser may have stepped over the boundary. Professionals may still look at the ad’s subtext—‘online buying is child’s play’—but that may not be how the average viewer is seeing it,” he says.

Kartik Iyer, CEO, Happy Creative Services (the makers of the Flipkart advert), defends the use of the halt in the conversation, saying coyness or shyness around the opposite sex is evident among children of all ages. “It’s an innocent feeling, an excitement of discovering the unknown. To call that sexual or romance is utterly wrong.”

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What’s got everybody’s attention is not just the advertisements, but a fear of the herd mentality—that advertisers will try and ratchet up the sizzle factor in the portrayal of children by a notch or two.

Unsaid, but palpable, is a fear that Indian kids are maturing faster, especially in urban areas. Studies claim adolescence arrives at 11 or 12 now, instead of 13 or 14. Families are smaller, and parents busier. “Children are dragged to the marketplace by their parents because urban nuclear families have no one to entrust their child with. Kids go everywhere with their parents, watching negotiations beyond their age. Add to this the guilt of busy parents and, voila, you have children with consumption clout,” says Halve.

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The worry is that children, desperate to “belong”, will go to any lengths—even having sex—if they see it on TV. “Where adults see innuendo, children don’t, simply because they are not mature enough. But if the impact of advertising on children is the concern, then the focus should be on all adult advertising. Truth is, this is the big grey area of advertising; we just don’t know how children perceive adults,” says adman Prahlad Kakkar, referring to the messy eating Cadbury’s teens indulge in. He says the ad simply challenges parental instructions to not eat messily—it’s deviant behaviour, to be sure, but not exploitative.

That’s what Piyush Pandey, executive chairman and national creative director, Ogilvy & Mather, argues too. He was in New York when he first got the call telling him the Vodafone campaign is being heckled online. “My first thought was, ‘somebody needs to have their head examined.’ Where some see ‘puppy love’, I see innocent friendship. Adults see ‘romance’ in a boy and a girl being together alone—now I say, what kind of medieval notion is that?”

It’s an oft-repeated tale in India, says brand consultant Harish Bijoor. TV advertisements are made by the well-heeled in Delhi and Mumbai, but they are watched all over the country. “Some years ago, we had the Amul advertisement which said, yeh to bada toing hai. It led to women being ragged by men, creating such a problem that it had to be banned.”

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Fundamentally, the same argument must apply for children too—that TV must appeal to the lowest common denominator; religious, social or political. Looking to ads for social responsibility, then, might be asking for too much.

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