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

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