Children have brand awareness by the age of three which at first glance seems absolutely extraordinary. But of course brands are all around them, so much so that they don't recognise brands or consumerism as any kind of assault. It is just an integral part of their world. It prepares them to take their place in society by becoming consumers.
That the advertising industry turns techniques designed to manipulate adult emotions and desires on to children as young as two, is now impossible to avoid. Children grow up with television and screens as part of life from babyhood on. The TV is feeding children a constant diet of characters and goods which they can or need to acquire and consume. The question is how to give children alternative springboards to imaginative play so that their worlds are not just peopled by those the brands have dreamed up.
Parents have to work hard to encourage their children's imaginations to go beyond Disneyfication. They can talk to them about these branded characters and encourage their capacity for language and imagination but there is still an inherent difficulty in that these characters are underpinned by particular constraints in what they do as well as powerful consumer messages, with all the pressures that involves.
Children are vulnerable to advertising at any age. It gives them a focus for identity in those crucial years when they are trying to work out where they belong. Even those children from enlightened families, who we may think are better equipped to counter the negative effects of advertising, want to own and identify with the consumer characters that enthral their peers. It is part of what their play is about.
I hope this campaign will push back the relentless assault on childhood in which we have girls as young as five years old preoccupied with their bodies. It used to be that one could enjoy playing with a Barbie doll. Nowadays, girl children are so constantly bombarded with such images that they are encouraged to imagine that being a Barbie is the way they should be. Sadly the emphasis on appearance, which is beamed at all women (and now increasingly boys and men), means that there is an awful pressure in the household on how we look. There are huge profits to be made from making us all feel insecure in our bodies, and body distress is infiltrating nearly all families.
Parents and nursery workers have a tough challenge to counter the limiting world of advertising and expand their children's imaginations. For the good of society and our children we need to get away from the narrow line that advertising imposes. Subverting those characters and inventing others with our children will be more nourishing to their intellect and to their emotional life and to all of our futures.
- Susie Orbach's books include the best-selling Fat is a Feminist Issue, Bodies and Fifty Shades of Feminism.
Dr Richard House, campaign supporter and early childhood lecturer at the University of Winchester, explains why campaigners including authors, academics, MPs and charity leaders are determined to succeed with a ban.
The campaign started most improbably with a conversation that founder Jonathan Kent had in a bun shop in Cambridge - and it's now making waves in the highest political and media circles in the land.
Campaigning is always about the art of the possible - and there are many forces ranged against what we're trying to do. Not least, we're up against a £12 billion-a-year advertising industry, which knows that selling to six-year-olds is far easier than selling to their parents. The raising of parents' awareness is crucial, with public opinion hopefully changing so that parents will start treating commercial interests just like any other stranger coming into contact with their children - that is, they will expect them to have their children's best interests at heart; and when they demonstrably don't, they' will keep clear.
However, as Jonathan Kent points out, even a complete ban on overt advertising targeting small children won't solve the problem of business co-opting our children, so anything that falls short of that probably won't be enough. Regulation doesn't have a good track record, with regulators being too close to those they regulate, so a clear boundary of no advertising to under-elevens is probably the only outcome that stands a chance of being really effective.