Concerned Parents March on Downing Street

In my day job, I write a weekly newsletter for the Advertising Association. This one was picked up and published by my friends and yours, at Media Week.

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Today, after a year’s work, two major reports, countless meetings with government, innumerable meetings with brands, media owners and agencies, a big-hitting Leadership Panel, a raft of industry-backed measures to protect children and a lot of public debate about an issue which everyone has a different view on, concerned parents from AA towers went to No.10 to talk to the Prime Minister about advertising and children.

Mark Lund, head of the AA’s Children’s Panel, introduced the new Advertising Association guidance designed to stop companies using under 16s as brand ambassadors or in peer-to-peer marketing. Here’s the wording,  fact fans:

“Young people under the age of 16 should not be employed and directly or indirectly paid or paid-in-kind to actively promote brands, products, goods, services, causes or ideas to their peers, associates or friends.”

So that’s that then.

Nearly 20 major brands have already signed up, including Unilever, Coca-Cola and Pepsico, and the pledge has been backed by Facebook and countless trade associations, many of which have written it into their codes of practice for members. If you don’t want your brand to be left behind, you need to speak to Sue or Nick, right now.

Emerging from Number 10 this evening, the AA’s Tim Lefroy said that industry’s responsive attitude to the Bailey Review agenda had been praised by the Prime Minister, who had been impressed by the speed with which it was tackling technologically complex issues like online adult content.

At the same meeting, Guy Parker from the ASA and Mike Baker – of Outdoor Media Centre fame – updated the PM on the advertising industry’s moves to restrict the use of sexualised imagery in outdoor media, particularly near schools.

The OMC has given advice to its membership (over 95% of outdoor advertisers), and offered the ability for concerned advertisers to request their work is not displayed within 100m of schools or other sensitive locations.

The ASA – advertising’s regulator – has also been busy. In conjunction with the regulatory mums and dads at other acronym-based bodies like Ofcom, the PCC, ATVOD et al, they have built a website for parents worried about the media content accessible to their children. Add ParentPort to your bookmarks page now and you can follow a step-by-step guide which shows you where to direct your complaint, or contribute to the discussion yourself.

Finally, BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin will offer new customers an ‘active choice’ as to whether to activate adult-content controls, which would screen out pornographic websites.

The Daily Mail website covered this delicate issue in its own inimitable style, placing a story on ‘internet sleaze’ next to pictures of an oiled and muscular Jodie Marsh in a bikini, an upskirt shot of Pixie Lott’s bottom and a photo of a topless Mischa Barton eating steak out a man’s hand. The steak, disgustingly, was uncooked.

As David Cameron reminded everyone today – there is still more to do. But as another Conservative Prime Minister said, undoubtedly referring to the ongoing debates around the “commercialisation and sexualisation” of childhood:

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

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