Day 299 - 13 Nov 96 - Page 39
1 cannot have advertisements where someone says to the
2 children, "Go and get your parents to take you to
3 McDonald's" then you just do it rather more subtly than
4 that. I mean, that is, it seems to me, to be the real
5 point of it. Anyway, there you are. If all this is just
6 designed to say that the first and second Plaintiffs and
7 the agencies who advise them give a great deal of extremely
8 careful consideration to how, through children's
9 advertising, to make the McDonald's stores or restaurants
10 very attractive to children, I think there cannot be my
11 dispute about that.
12
13 MS. STEEL: It all goes to how McDonald's and their advertising
14 agencies put a great deal of effort into how to manipulate
15 children and play on their emotions to get them into their
16 stores to eat the junk food.
17
18 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Anyway, I have made my feelings so far clear
19 about that.
20
21 MS. STEEL: I am not going to go through all of them. There
22 were a couple more I wanted to point out. Birdy, the early
23 bird, appears on bundle page 61, and Birdy the early bird
24 symbolises breakfast as McDonald's. "As an early bird,
25 Birdy greets the morning with particular delight especially
26 because morning means breakfast at McDonald's." Then
27 further on down, it says, "Birdy is McDonald's first female
28 character. Her enthusiasm and energy are infectious and
29 serve to encourage her friends to start the day with a good
30 breakfast. As she often says, 'you can't get off the
31 ground without breakfast', she let us her friends know that
32 McDonald's serves a good one". That is an indication of
33 intent from the company to encourage children to think that
34 they should start every day with a breakfast at McDonald's
35 because you cannot get off the ground without breakfast.
36
37 Then there is the HamBurglar. This is on page 62. "The
38 HamBurglar is the most mischievous character in all
39 McDonaldland. His main purpose in life is the acquisition
40 of McDonald's hamburgers. He is not above borrowing them
41 without payment, and nobody expects payment." This is
42 directly relevant to the part in the leaflet which states
43 that "appetite, necessity and, above all, money never enter
44 the innocent world of ronald mcdonald" and the part about
45 "burgers and chips being provided for everybody at any
46 hour of the day", and so on.
47
48 Obviously, later on it describes how the "Hamburglar cannot
49 help being what he is in that other characters try to keep
50 hamburgers safe from him, but his behaviour never angers
51 anyone in McDonaldland. After all, the temptation is too
52 great for him to resist." So there is a suggestion there
53 of his addiction to hamburgers, and children might find it
54 attractive to copy that, particularly if they see that his
55 behaviour does not anger anyone despite the fact that he is
56 getting all these burgers for nothing.
57
58 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes. I can't say I was terribly impressed
59 with that. I take your point that it is about the
60 suggestion that they are irresistible.
