I built this website. From scratch. Including the servers.
As someone who is really interested in fact not rhetoric I really don't think this point is that difficult to understand. Let me try it again; Sweden has a toothless law that exists only on paper which states that advertising to children is banned.
In reality, Sweden's TV channels with advertising are, and have been since 1987 when national ad-TV became a reality, aired from a country without such laws in place ; the UK. So, the national TV channels follow UK advertising laws and have ads aimed at children before, during and after the children's programming. All day and all night, and there ain't nothing Sweden's 'law' can do about it.
As a funny coincidence, the obesity rate among children in Sweden has skyrocketed in the past 15 years.
You can say "Sweden has a ban" as much as you want, in reality, the ban does not exist and never has. Any Swedish kid who turns on his TV these past 18 years will have seen ads targeted to them. Anyone who has kept up on the Swedish advertising news knows that the non-functioning ban is a matter of constant battle between the advertisers, the lawyers and the politicians - it's always in the tradepress around our parts. The advertisers always win, they have the right to air as many ads as they wish, whenever the hell they please, aiming at targets as young as 1 years old if they want to.
Please note, this "fact" is the only thing in the series of facts you have listed that I am objecting to and trying to correct. It's not a fact see, it's just an imagined utopia which people outside of the country of Sweden believe is true. So if that is bullshit, one might wonder how many of your other facts on which you base your arguments, are true? One might not too, i'm just saying that one could. Ever heard that annoying old expression lies, lies and statistics?
So my end point still stands, while it might be only one thing in a lot of factors that affect peoples behaviour, advertising can not be excluded from the blame when it comes to our obese and unhealthy lifestyles around the world today, in my ever so humble opinion. After all, we charge clients a lot of money for the ability to convince people to buy stuff - saying that our ads didn't make people buy stuff is just a tad off isn't it?
We never forced people to smoke either, yet tobacco ads are banned all over Europe these days, and the consumption of these legal products has been banned from all public buildings and resturants, starting in the US and spreading all across the world. Funny that, first they stopped the ads.. Then they tried stopping the habit (in public at least).
A litle birdie jusst told me that this ..this... thing (aah, the HORROR!) has made it all the way into the Dutch ad tradepress a.k.a Adformatie - where the CEO of Mindshare expresses how pleased he is with this, and states that he is thinking of sending it in for the media awards, as best media stunt. Seriously.
Ah, I guess I should have put this in the article as well, the related links - ANA chews the fat on kiddie obesity from Adfreak:
We’ve no doubt the ANA has done its homework on this issue, but trying to change public perception of advertising’s role in childhood obesity seems like a losing battle, no matter how many facts and figures are thrown our way. All it takes is sitting through one half-hour of Cartoon Network programming with a seven-year-old, who consequently pines for the sugar-laden snacks he saw on TV, to get what we’re talking about.
Advertisers Share The Blame For Fat Kids on Message from Wagner Communications
Jaffe cites statistics that show the amount of junk food advertising aimed at children has declined. And advertising folks and their clients all say that obesity is a matter of personal choice.
Maybe so.
But if you're working to create demand for a product that's bad for people -- and remember we're talking kids here -- aren't you part of the problem?
Hey there rille. :)
HTML is ok here, so I'll just make that link, a real link. ;) Voila: Dissertation: Artificial Market Actors: Explorations of Automated Business Interactions
Aha, it turns out I still had more things lodged in my brain here. I keep thinking we could have put on a real show if me and swedish ad-blogger Researcher duked it out, as I know we have different opinions on a few things and act as siamese twins on others. That could have been a lot of fun. And it would have been much more on the topic of advertising and less PR. Advertising is having a field-day with blogs, see virals (which mainly spread through them and email and forums), blogads and branded sponsorship deals for bloggers.
The thing about blogs that I personally always fancied - apart from the community ones which are my faves - is the single-subject blogs. Super nerds blog about supernerdy stuff they know a lot about. Flyfishing specialists blog about flyfishing. ;) Art Historians blog about art! I'm a sucker for the insight of people that are really into something, whatever that something may be.
But as I look around the blogosphere (shoot me for using that word) in smaller countries like Sweden I find that what floats to the top are blogs that regurgitate the national and international news. Based on a badly researched paragraph in a cheap tabloid with less than stellar journalistic skills, they'll blog their opinion on the Terry Schiavo case over in Texas. They haven't checked out the full story behind the Terry Schiavo case, just read the evening tabloid, and none of them had any new insight on the matter. No extra links to other articles or something like that, just their opinion. Badabing, there it is. It was little opinion-bytes in every blog "That Terry thing is bad. Americans are nuts". Okaay. Just once I'd like to see a Swedish Doctor, Lawyer, Nurse or Next of kin to someone in such a situation blog their opinion on the case as they have more insight on that particular matter - be it from experience or work. What would happen had Terry lived in Sweden? As I have understood it - and I might be wrong - the next of kin to a patient in a vegetative state would not be the person who decides to stop the feeding, as that is a medical decision (just like in Holland). Think about that for a second. Yes, that mans Doctors make that decision every day, let patient X starve to death, and the next of kin be they parent, spouse or child, have nothing they can say about it. Grandma getting too old to save? Remove the feeding tube and let them starve to death. Did any of the Swedish blogs note this? I didn't see anyone do that, I must be reading the wrong ones. Actually, I'd love to see a regular nurse blog - nurses are always in the news directly or indirectly, and a real nurses input on the tabloids hysterical headlines would probably make a very interesting blog.
Oh dear, did I just jabber on there again? :)
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