YES - Andrew Nebel, Consultant, Hemgate, and former marketing director, Barnado's
'Secs sells', as the topless Renault on the billboards currently announces. Always has, always will. An objective review of advertising over the past 50 years would probably show a rise in the use of sex and erotic creative content. This is often in areas beyond the expected ones of fashion and cosmetics. Remember the great BBH work for Haagen-Dazs? Hardly an approach I remember Wall's using to sell me ice cream in my innocent 50s childhood.
It would be unusual if this increased exposure passed unnoticed by generations of children who, like all of us, consume all communications. However, I'm less convinced there has been a significant increase in such advertising specifically aimed at children.
Children today are more sexually aware, but surely government has the wit to look beyond advertising and consider the other influencing factors: an increasingly liberal, non-censorious, secular society; school sex education; youth publications; popular music and TV. In fact everything about 21st-century life influences children.
MAYBE - Mark Fawcett, Chief executive, National Schools Partnership
Marketing is often criticised because of an easy-to-see 'bad apple' - a product or campaign that you know straight away is just wrong.
In my experience, and from an agency view, there have been fewer of these in recent years. Whether that's because of better planning or self-regulation, increased ethics or a sensible fear of consumer-led social and media commentary, is anybody's guess. It's probably a mix of them all.
Last year's 'Buckingham Report' showed how hard it is to identify the impact many factors have on children.
Marketing, the internet, peer pressure and parents can all play a negative or positive role. The recent Department for Education survey appears to focus more on marketing, and starts from a point of view that believes there is definitely a problem to solve.
If the spotlight is going to be on advertising, at the expense of other factors, the end results risk creating little or no positive impact for children. I suspect the government knows and understands that already.
MAYBE - Richard Exon, Chief executive, RKCR/Y&R
Blaming the ad industry for the sexualisation of children strikes me as an unlikely government policy. However, it does seem that our industry has been targeted for special treatment.
The arguments are well-rehearsed, but no less compelling for being so. While effective at changing consumer behaviour, ads generally reflect rather than drive our social values. As those values change, so will advertising.
However, when this change feels uncomfortable, the causal relationship between society and ad imagery becomes confused. Some people start to believe that if brands advertised differently, social change would follow.
This is nonsense. If all advertising stopped tomorrow, parents would still allow children to watch films that are rated as too old for them, internet porn would still be on school kids' mobiles, and there would still be rising amounts of sexual content on pre-watershed TV.
Advertising is a small element of the content we consume, and any further attempts to regulate it won't affect how childhood is changing in the UK.
NO - Tom Huxtable, Managing director, 23red
The question is whether it would be right to blame the sexualisation of children solely on the ad industry. The government must protect children, and it has to be seen to be doing something. However, it requires informed direction by communications experts.
The ad industry could be forgiven for feeling the messenger was being shot. Indeed, rather than finger-pointing, it would be more beneficial if the government sought our advice.
Childhood is defined by innocence, something that is hard to hold onto in the modern, information-rich world. In addition, the influence of celebrity role models has been tip-toed around, and peer pressure insufficiently recognised - the latter being one of the biggest influences on children and difficult to control.
Marketing to children should be sensitively regulated, but the variety of other influencing factors in their sexualisation must be addressed too.
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