Advertisements Targeting Children: The Protective Code of the 2022 Guidelines

Children are the one audience the net-impression standard cannot protect, because their impressions are formed without the adult discount for salesmanship. The 2022 Guidelines therefore give advertisements that address, target or are likely to influence children a code of their own, stricter at every point than the general law. This note sets out the code's rules, the reasoning behind each, the neighbouring regimes, and enforcement.

1. The Trigger: When the Code Applies

The code is not confined to advertisements placed in children's media: it applies to any advertisement that addresses or targets children or is likely to influence them, judged by content, placement, characters, music and the product itself. The toy and snack advertisement is the obvious case; the family-audience campaign built around child characters, the game and app promotion, and the school-adjacent marketing are within it just as surely. The question, as everywhere in this field, is impression, here, the impression on a child, with the child's credulity as the measure.

2. The Rules of the Code

• No exploitation of inexperience or credulity: the advertisement must not take advantage of children's inexperience, credulity or sense of loyalty, the trust a child places in a familiar character or hero cannot be the selling mechanism, and fantasy must not be presented so that a child takes it for the product's real performance.
• No superiority or ridicule claims: it must not suggest that owning or using the product makes a child better, smarter or more popular than others, or that children without it are open to ridicule, contempt or inferiority, the playground-status pitch is condemned by name.
• No children in barred-product advertising: children must not be featured in advertisements for products legally barred to minors, alcohol, tobacco and their kin, and advertisements for such products must not be designed to reach them.
• Substantiated health and nutrition claims only: claims of health, nutrition or benefit directed at children must be adequately substantiated, recognised scientific support, not the cartoon's assurance; and the Guidelines require care that food and beverage advertising does not mislead about nutritive value or encourage excessive consumption.
• No unattainable-results imagery: sports personalities and celebrities cannot be used to imply that consuming the product delivers their physique or performance, the drink does not make the cricketer.
• No purchase exhortation or pestering: the advertisement must not directly exhort children to buy, or to ask parents or others to buy, and must not undermine parental authority or suggest parents who refuse are lesser.
• No dangerous imitation: nothing a child is likely to imitate to his harm, stunts, misuse of the product, hazardous settings, without clear warning; and nothing condoning behaviour unsafe for children.
• Charity and chance: children's charitable sentiment is not to be exploited, and games of chance and prize promotions are not to be pressed on an audience that cannot evaluate them.

3. The Neighbouring Regimes and Enforcement

• Food law: the food-safety framework restricts misleading claims on foods and governs advertising of high fat, sugar and salt products, with child-directed food advertising a standing concern of FSSAI regulation and the self-regulatory codes.
• Broadcast and self-regulation: the Cable Television Networks advertising code and the ASCI code for children's advertising apply alongside, platform and broadcaster standards enforcing much of the same substance contractually.
• The junk-food and gaming frontiers: surrogate-free promotion of age-barred products, in-game purchases and app marketing to children, and influencer channels watched predominantly by children are the code's live edges, with CCPA advisories and the dark-patterns guidelines reaching the design-side manipulation.
• Enforcement: contravention is enforced as misleading advertisement, CCPA discontinuance and modification orders, penalties on manufacturer, advertiser and endorser, the endorser ban, and the Section 89 offence, with the Commissions' unfair-practice jurisdiction open to parents and consumer associations; the child-directed character of an advertisement is also an express factor aggravating penalty, the statute weighs the vulnerability of the audience.

4. Related Topics and Provisions

• The 2022 Guidelines (Topic 72): the code's instrument
• Misleading advertisement under Section 2(28) (Topic 19): the general standard this code tightens
• CCPA powers and penalties (Topic 28): audience vulnerability in the penalty factors
• Endorsements (Topic 76): the influencer channels children watch