Day 299 - 13 Nov 96 - Page 24
1 television could be £3,000 for 30 seconds. He agreed at
2 line 51 that you can purchase considerably more times of
3 showing a children's advertisement for the same amount of
4 money you would have to spend on one adult advertisement.
5 He said that it would be a waste of money to show it a lot
6 of times to children, but that does not seem to be borne
7 out by all the evidence in the day about the virtual
8 continual bombardment of advertisements towards children
9 from McDonald's. On average... Well, for virtually all of
10 the years we have got from 1988, 1989, it is mostly around
11 40 to 45 weeks of advertising every year to children.
12
13 With those figures for the cost of an advert during
14 Coronation Street or during children's television time, and
15 taking figures which were given in the total media
16 expenditure chart, for example 1989, it works out about 14
17 million pounds on adult advertising, which, if you divide
18 it by 30,000, you would get 466 advertisements for that
19 amount of money whilst the four million which is listed on
20 the total media expenditure chart for advertising to
21 children in 1989, if you divided that by £3,000 you would
22 get 1,333 adverts to children. So that is nearly three
23 times as many advertisements to children as adults based on
24 the figures in McDonald's media expenditure chart. Even if
25 the advertisements were only five times cheaper than for
26 adults, you would still get one and a half times as many
27 advertisements being directed to children than were being
28 directed to adults.
29
30 Obviously, on top of that you have got to take into
31 consideration the fact that, as Mr. Hawkes admitted, most
32 of the so-called adult advertisements feature children and
33 would also appeal to children anyway, or would affect or
34 would have an effect on children. Just that particular
35 point came up on day 41, page 26, line 13. I think it was
36 you asked that you noticed that considerable use was made
37 of children in the adult advertisements, and Mr. Hawkes
38 said that that was true and he said that the purpose was
39 the reflection of a typical day and a typical week across
40 McDonald's, and obviously that would be something that
41 would appeal to children that were watching as well. In
42 fact, in our view, it is almost certainly the case that the
43 advertisements were designed in that way, especially seeing
44 as they were going to be shown in cross-over time when the
45 company is well aware that children would be watching.
46
47 For example, there was the advertisement with the child's
48 first day at school, and then being taken for a treat.
49 Obviously, that is something that would appeal to the
50 child. I think it is just completely ludicrous for
51 McDonald's to try and assert that that would not be
52 something that was aimed at children. It may be aimed at
53 adults as well, but it is certainly aimed at children.
54
55 Can I just make a point, as well, about the total media
56 expenditure figures? I think they are behind Mr. Hawkes'
57 statement, total media expenditure, 1986 to 1982. We would
58 given these the day that Mr. Hawkes went into the witness
59 box, which was in October 1994, and I just noticed
60 yesterday that the fax date on them is April 1994, and that
