Day 054 - 24 Nov 94 - Page 30
1 is misleading. Secondly, he is a -----
2
3 MR. JUSTICE BELL: He is an extremely tall, well-built man?
4 A. Yes.
5
6 Q. With considerable speed?
7 A. It may in that sense then also associate the product
8 with physical size, physical fitness.
9
10 MS. STEEL: Yes. You had a second concern on Mr. Jordan as
11 well?
12 A. Yes, sorry. Well, I think I would rather put the two
13 together. I mean, the concern that this is a character
14 with which children and adolescents are going to feel drawn
15 towards.
16
17 Q. They will look up to them?
18 A. Yes, yes. The sense of loyalty, wanting to even know
19 this person, to feel that they could get closer to him, but
20 also the association of somebody who is a healthy person
21 with health, fitness and sport with a product, I think that
22 could be said to be giving a misleading impression of the
23 products that McDonald's offers.
24
25 Q. Are there any other techniques that you wanted to talk
26 about? If you have not finished on characters, then carry
27 on.
28 A. No, that is my summary of the techniques used in
29 McDonald's advertisements and some of my concerns about
30 them.
31
32 Q. Did you want to say anything about the use of fantasy as a
33 technique or do you recall you have covered that already?
34 A. Yes, just to make one further point to refer to a
35 reference on this about the difficulty that children, young
36 children, have in distinguishing between fact and fantasy.
37 If I could refer you again to Dr. Brian Young's paper which
38 is A1, yes, on page 29, section 3.4. Dr. Young looks at
39 the development of advertising literacy in the child. In
40 the second paragraph he talks about children of two to
41 three years, even four years, believing that the people on
42 TV are as real as their mums, dads, sisters and brothers.
43 "For young children, people exist in the TV set and the
44 child will often talk and shout to them and treat them no
45 differently from real people". He also talks about
46 children's difficulty at that age of understanding a story
47 line. But he also points out: "The young preschool child
48 is very responsive to attention-arousing effects and it is
49 these external attention-grabbing properties of the
50 stimulus of television that drives the child's attention
51 and influences how the young child will process information
52 from television rather any set of expectations of what'll
53 happen next".
54
55 He is talking generally about television here, not just
56 about advertising in this context, but I think what becomes
57 clear is the attention-arousing effects, some of which
58 I have talked about in the use of techniques, that these
59 will be extremely effective in attracting even a very young
60 child's attention.
