The Advertising Standards Authority has found a Strings & Things advert featuring animated cat Garfield has broken its regulations around advertising HFSS products to children.
The video-on-demand ad, which aired in May on Channel 4, featured a child jumping into her mum’s shopping bag to eat a packet of Cheestrings.
She was then seen floating in a fictional world of Cheestrings before the appearance of the cartoon cat Garfield, whose image had been licensed to brand owner Kerry Dairy Consumer Foods as part of a deal to promote The Garfield Movie. The ad ended with a promotion for prizes to be won including a Garfield movie-themed trip to California.
The complainant claimed the ad was for an HFSS product and targeted directly at pre-school or primary school children, with a promotional offer and a licensed character popular with children.
In response, Kerry said the ad was not targeted at children but parents, which was reflected by the ad placing the mother, the person who purchases the Cheestrings product, as the central character. It added that the tone was “grown up” and clearly intended for an older audience.
It also said that the character of Garfield was “deliberately chosen because of his appeal to adults” due to its creation in the 1970s. The ad was intended to appeal to adult viewers through a sense of nostalgia for the character rather than to appeal directly to children, it said.
It also said the competition prizes were designed to appeal to adults, and to enter the competition consumers had to be over 21.
The brand said it had taken measures to ensure it would not be seen by children by only broadcasting on on-demand programmes locked to those under 16 years of age, and/or was not scheduled to appear in or around programmes commissioned for under-16s.
Strings & Things had also double-checked the platform’s metrics and understood that the audience who used it was almost exclusively adults, Kerry said. It therefore believed it would have been highly unlikely that any children would have seen the ad.
However, the ASA said that while the character was introduced in the 1970s, the timing of the ad coincided with the release of the U-rated Garfield animated film, which was likely popular with under-12s.
It also said that while the prizes, including a trip to California, would have been appealing to adults, the ad’s content, image and tone would have been appealing and engaging to children under 12.
For these reasons the ASA upheld the complaint that it was a HFSS product advert that featured a promotional offer aimed at children.
The advertising watchdog also upheld that the advert breached the code by including a licensed character popular with children in an HFSS product ad.
The brand said great care had been taken to ensure the ad was targeted at adults and that it had no plans to broadcast the ad again.
The ad must not appear again in the form complained of, the ASA said.
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