Dr. Mimi Tatlow-Golden:

Several points arise. I agree absolutely with a watershed. It was really interesting when we did the research. We started with figures. We got the data through the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland on actual viewing times of young children. They were altogether different from what people had imagined. People thought young people were watching between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. at the weekends before their parents had got up. In fact, they were watching across the day and a great deal of viewing is taking place beyond 9 p.m. A watershed is the least we would need to put in place to achieve some effects.

What we saw in the study was that people were complying with the legislation completely but it was not reducing advertisement exposure. We have seen this in other jurisdictions as well. The reason is that the advertisers move to other times. If they were advertising heavily towards children at one time, then they moved to the mixed audiences. The idea was that it would not only be during the big movie time but at the times of big sporting events. A major football tournament is coming up. If I wanted to put money on it, I would say there will be a great deal of advertising that should not really be tied in with the heroes, high-stakes physical activity and all the excitement and emotion. Psychologically, all of that gets transferred onto the brand. There is a reason they want to advertise during these events – it is not only because of the large viewing numbers.

It is certainly about identifying when children are watching television and taking the advertisements out of those times. It is sometimes considered politically unpalatable because those times are when many other people are watching television as well, including adults. However, I believe we have reached the point when we need to consider how we protect children and future generations rather than considering whether we are facilitating certain kinds of marketing activity. That is one point.

The other point relates to nutrient profiling. This is where it gets technical and it relates to the way we decide whether something should be advertised. It is a question of how we classify food and how we decide whether it is healthy or less healthy. The model we use in Ireland is derived from the UK nutrient profiling model. Studies have shown that model is very weak in terms of deciding on whether we should advertise certain products for children. In the study, we used the World Health Organization nutrient profiling model that was developed subsequently. It has been rolled out in Slovenia and other places. We found that of all the food advertisements watched by the children, half related to unhealthy food because the children were watching at times not scheduled for children's programming. However, when we classified the advertising by the WHO criteria, the figure jumped up to 75%.