Day 283 - 21 Oct 96 - Page 24
1 themselves must be aware that these criticisms are in the
2 public domain and that seemingly they must know they are
3 valid criticisms as well. This is the point of this
4 particular exercise I am making, that not only do they know
5 that some people eat their - not some people but three
6 quarters of their customers are what they call heavy
7 users. Three quarters of their custom, sorry, not three
8 quarters of their customers. But they actually target
9 those people in order to increase the regularity in order
10 to keep their profit levels up because of competition from
11 other junk food and fast food outlets. And, as we have
12 seen from their operations manual, they know that people
13 who are heavy users of McDonald's are also likely to be the
14 people that are eating similar food elsewhere for the rest
15 of the week.
16
17 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
18
19 MR. MORRIS: Finally on nutrition, of course, we brought
20 defence witnesses to back up our case and back up the
21 London Greenpeace fact sheet, and very eminent and
22 experienced and authoritative they were as well, including
23 Professor Crawford, Colin Campbell and Dr. Barnard and
24 Geoffrey Cannon, amongst others.
25
26 If I can move on to advertising, the effect of advertising
27 on children and the viewpoint - well, the targeting of
28 children and the viewpoint that it is in some way
29 pernicious or unethical or a pain in the neck for the
30 adults is basically a commonly held view. I have never
31 heard anybody in my whole life say 'we welcome advertising
32 as a way of informing our children about the options
33 available'. Most parents are sick to death of being
34 pestered by their kids because they have seen something on
35 television, whether it is toys or whether it is a
36 McDonald's advert which, of course, uses toys precisely for
37 that reason, because the child then pesters their parents.
38 We have heard that in some countries, as McDonald's is
39 aware, children's advertising is banned. It is not banned
40 for the fun of it; it is banned to protect children and
41 their parent from such influences.
42
43 Regarding McDonald's awareness of this, obviously they know
44 some countries have banned advertising; they know that it
45 has been debated by various statutory or semi-statutory
46 committees in America; they know that the National Food
47 Alliance in this country has been campaigning to ban the
48 children's adverts for sugary and fatty foods. In their
49 operations manual we have heard how they used Ronald
50 MacDonald, they use what they call children's love for
51 Ronald MacDonald and therefore love for their food as an
52 emotional targeting strategy, which the use of children's
53 emotions in advertising is in theory banned by the
54 Advertising Standards Authority.
55
56 In reality, McDonald's are allowed to get away with an
57 entire strategy based upon the manipulation of children's
58 emotions, and they know it. They have set it out in
59 writing not only in their operations manual, which is not
60 strictly about TV advertising, it is about Ronald MacDonald
