Mr. Jonathan White:

Yes. Sponsorship was included in the European citizens' initiative I mentioned. The reason for that, essentially, is that it is seen as a key way of maintaining social licence and creating brand sympathy, which is inimical to the changes I flagged in my opening statement. It is also a lesson taken from the tobacco area. The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control includes a prohibition on activities called brand stretching and brand sharing, whereby a company advertises a product in order to maximise sales of another product that is core to its brand. It is that lesson that is really important to learn in this context. The tobacco example is one where narrower forms of advertising progressively widened to achieve the change that was needed, but we do not have as much time in this case.

The final issue I will flag is the importance of social media advertising. It is very difficult to police social media advertising for the simple reason that it cannot be found. Social media advertising occurs on some of the big tech platforms - Twitter, Facebook, etc. - but is shown only to the person who sees it. Some of those platforms, in limited ways, maintain databases that are searchable by the public for seeing what kinds of adverts popped up. They tend to pop up or run for sometimes three days a week over two weeks. Having tried to reconstruct that sort of thing a few times, I can tell the committee that it is very challenging to find out something even when you know what you are looking for, let alone trying to monitor it. It seems to be an area that is generally quite difficult to establish transparency over.