Want to advertise food or soft drink products using licensed characters or celebrities popular with children but not sure how to? Then avoid a culinary disaster by following this recipe:

Step One:
Add to one large mixing bowl, one or more brand characters popular with children. This is a matter of personal preference and budget, though staple ingredients can be found by a quick check of programming on children’s TV. Or, if you want a bit more spice, try one of the brands offered by a major film studio such as Dreamworks, 20th Century Fox or Warner Bros.

Oh, and by the way, if the food you want to advertise isn’t typically associated with children, don’t think this makes it safe. Unless you’re selecting fresh fruit or vegetables, using any brand character or celebrity popular with children, even if the food or drink is intended primarily to target adults, can still result in upheld complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.

Step Two:
Now select the food items you want to add. This is where you need care; your choice of food items is likely to determine the type of media in which you advertise. For example, if you’re planning to dish up your food advertising as a TV ad, then mixing brand-characters or celebrities with food or drink considered likely to encourage child-obesity will make your ad unfit for TV consumption.

Step Three:
Check the ingredients before TV advertising. You need to do this by grading your food or drink using the nutrient profiling model of the Food Standards Agency. This will determine whether the food contains healthy or not so healthy ingredients. Too many saturated fats, salts or sugars? Then, sorry, the FSA will give you a red traffic light and no TV advertising is allowed.

The only exception which may still curry favour with Clearcast, the industry body tasked with pre-clearance of all broadcast advertising, is where your branded character isn’t licensed but is one you’ve created to responsibly promote your food products; Kellogs’ Tony the Tiger for the Frosties brand and the animated monkeys for Coco Pops, are good examples.

But not all ingredients react the way you think when advertised. Fox’s Biscuits advertised their own character, Vinnie, an animated Danda or cross between a panda and a dog. Vinnie appeared in a TV ad in the role of a slightly sinister self-styled mobster who told viewers to go to their supermarket to ask Luigi for 'the good stuff'. Vinnie was to become a regular feature with Fox’s products, so you’d be forgiven for thinking using Vinnie would be no different to using Tony the Tiger, but no; following complaints that Vinnie was popular with children and shouldn’t have been used to advertise a 'red light' food under the FSA model, the ASA investigated. Although the complaint was not upheld, Vinnie can be justifiably offended that there was any investigation at all, but may be he should have started out life as an on-pack creation, before letting the TV publicity go to his head.

Serving Suggestion:
That’s all there is to it, if you wanted to serve up your recipe of licensed brands and food advertising as a TV dinner. In fact serving up your advertising anywhere on your own turf is also okay, whether it's on packaging for your own products, in your own store or on your own website.

But don’t try it as a take away; serving up this mix in the papers will result in an upheld complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority, because using popular children’s characters or celebrities for food advertising in any paid-for non-broadcast media is forbidden.

And unlike TV, unless we’re talking fresh fruit and veg again, it makes no difference however low in fat, salt or sugar your dish is.

Serves: Some advertisers but by no means all!

Please also see this month’s article A Review of How Licensors of Children’s Brands and the Food And Soft Drinks Sector Have Reacted To Regulatory Change And Changing Attitudes.