Product Placement: More Ways To Sell Sugar To Kids

I've already nailed my colours to the mast about product placement in television (I'm against it) In fact, since I wrote that post, I've found even more reasons to be against it, not least that it's all too easy for production companies to take this 'extra' cash (which isn't necessarily extra cash at all) and... fork it over to the shareholders/executives, leaving production budgets even worse off than they were before.

But here's another reason to feel really quite uncomfortable about it.

The Childrens' Food Campaign want to improve young people’s health and well-being through better food – and food teaching – in schools and by protecting children from junk food marketing. They are supported by over 300 organisations and 12,000 members of the public, and have this to say:

"The Children’s Food Campaign is not alone in being alarmed by the recent announcement by Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Ben Bradshaw to lift the ban on product placement on British made TV shows . If this ban is reversed the result could be junk food brands appearing in programmes popular with children such as Britain’s Got Talent and Coronation Street."

So not only are loosened restrictions on product placement being aggressively pushed ahead to enrich a few people at the expense of, well, pretty much everyone else who works in, or watches television, it's also yet another means by which large corporations can peddle their deeply unhealthy wares to children.

Childrens' health is just one aspect of this deeply worrying proposal to lift the strict limitations on product placement, but an incredibly important one, and there's only eight weeks to act, so please consider taking a moment to register your objections here.