TOO MUCH, TOO YOUNG

A third of them drink alcohol, a third have played the National Lottery and increasing numbers are taking up smoking. The nation’s 4.5 million adolescents may face their own teenage angst, have problems at school and give their parents the runaround, but this year these smoking, drinking and gambling youngsters have become one big headache for marketers.

Children spend an estimated 95m a year on smoking and possibly as much as 200m on gaming; and while no figures exist for alcohol spending among children, it could also be as high as 100m. As such, they constitute an important source of sales in these areas, but one that is giving the purveyors of drink, cigarettes and scratchcards a serious dilemma.

Last week’s publication by National Lottery regulator Oflot of its report outlining the extent to which children are playing the Lottery demonstrates the problem (MW December 6). While Camelot is publicly obliged to discourage children from playing the Lottery, in so doing it may have to dilute the game’s brand proposition – and just as bad, lose an important stream of income.

The Oflot report showed that one in six children had played the Lottery in the preceding week. Rough estimates suggest this could mean that they accounted for between 2m and 3m worth of sales in one week, or 150m in a year.

This is admittedly a small percentage of the Lottery’s total annual sales of 4bn. But with falling sales of scratchcards, Camelot needs all the sales it can get or it risks missing its weekly 90m target for raising funds for the “Good Causes”. Sales have already fallen as low as 80m in some weeks although it hopes the introduction of a midweek draw will redress that.

The researcher commissioned by Oflot to carry out the report, Sue Fisher of the Faculty of Human Studies at the University of Plymouth, suggests that one way to lessen the problem is to raise the minimum age for players from 16 to 18, taking 1.2 million potential punters out of the market. This would severely hit Lottery sales, and make those targets even more difficult to meet.

Of equal concern for Camelot is Oflot’s requirement that it mounts a “public awareness campaign to stamp out illegal sales of tickets to kids”. Now, it is one thing to state that tickets are not for sale to under-16s, but it is another to start going into details on how and why it should be stamped out. Such a campaign may suggest that the Lottery is not the harmless flutter that it claims to be.

The public awareness campaign will run in parallel with promised enforcement of the law by Trading Standards departments, which are planning to recruit under-age children to buy tickets and then prosecute retailers selling them. But that places the responsibility on the retailer and turns into a legal, rather than brand positioning, issue.

“The focus will be to make sure the law is upheld,” says Camelot marketing director Jon Kinsey. “It will probably be aimed at the retailers, but this is not certain.”

Nonetheless, Fisher sees the whole brand positioning of the Lottery and the way it is marketed as contributing to its attractiveness to children. “The biggest influence on children has been the advertising and the TV draw show. Parents are buying draw tickets for children – some families are buying as a family occasion,” she says. “Clearly the marketing and advertising is very much in your face – it doesn’t seem to me that the marketing is targeting pensioners.”

She is particularly worried that parents believe it is harmless family fun to buy tickets for their children. The Oflot report shows that nine per cent of children had played the Lottery with tickets bought for them by their parents. Children as young as five are being encouraged to play the online game. Fisher adds: “Parents aren’t aware that children are twice as likely to be affected by problem gambling as adults.” And worse, the parents think “if the Government condones it, scratchcards must be safe”, she says.

Kinsey disagrees: “The Lottery is positioned as a harmless flutter. The promotional activity is always under scrutiny. There is no intention of changing the main thrust of the marketing. The ads are kept away from shows which attract under-16s and posters are not put near schools.” Yet Lottery terminals are difficult to miss, placed in newsagents, post offices and supermarkets.

Lottery marketers need only look at the experience of the drinks industry and the moral backlash against alcopops to see the potential damage that the underage issue can have.

Alcopops makers have been forced to dilute the branding of their products to head off even more restrictive legislation. The industry’s own watchdog, the Portman Group, produced a code of conduct for marketing alcoholic drinks to ensure companies are not seen to be luring children into a life of drunken debauchery. As a result, the brand owners cannot even call the drinks “alcoholic lemonades” (which they argue is the most appropriate product descriptor).

Last week, Sainsbury’s admitted that it was axing its own-label alcopop Piranha (MW December 6), ditching the branding and replacing it with “Sainsbury’s Alcoholic Lemon Drink”, which sounds more like lighter fuel than a stylish tipple for trendy young people. The chain was worried that its brand image of caring, responsible retailer (crucial when selling food) could become tarnished by associations with problem youth behaviour.

Sainsbury’s move follows Carlsberg-Tetley’s decision to pull the launch of its alcoholic jelly, Thickhead, after public outrage, and Bass being forced to drop the cartoon branding from the Hooper’s Hooch range to keep in line with the Portman recommendations. Alcopops, an innovative, sexy sector that once looked like a marketer’s dream, is being turned into a dull commodity market.

Marketers can take some comfort from the fact that the problem of under-age boozing, smoking and gambling is not all their fault. Although there have been examples of corporate thickheadedness – C-T’s alcoholic jelly looked like two fingers to the moral lobby, and some of the alcopop branding seemed designed to stoke the debate rather than douse it. Child experts accept that kids will be kids. Drinking, gambling, smoking and sex are all rites of passage on the journey to adulthood.

Marketers can point to smoking as an example. No sector has had more restrictions put on its marketing and distribution (other than perhaps handguns) over the past 20 years.

The health warnings on tobacco ads firmly link smoking and death in the consumer’s mind. Yet smoking among teenagers is on the up. According to the Schools Health Education Unit, the number of teenagers, and particularly girls, who take up smoking is growing. This compares with evidence from the same source that drinking among the young is declining every year (though the effect of alcopops has not yet been included in the Unit’s research).

Sophie Layard, senior account manager at marketing communications agency Brewer Blacker, which handles the Government-funded anti-smoking Respect campaign, says: “The main reason children smoke is boredom. They have a disposable income but at that age nowhere to go. They have a fatalistic approach – if you ask 11-year-olds who don’t like smoking if they will smoke when they are 15 they will often say ‘yes’, because they think cigarettes are a way of coping with stress from things such as exams.

“A cigarette pack is very tactile – in the insecure teenage years young people identify who they are by their brands.”

With a General Election looming, the moral lobby of the Church, social campaigners and some of the national newspapers have put the behaviour of children at the top of the social and political agenda. Children have been demonised as never before – made responsible for crime and the products of a morally decadent society.

Moves to legislate or self-regulate on the three vices as they affect children are becoming increasingly Draconian – in some towns the police are authorised to confiscate alcohol from young people if they appear drunk. The worry for Camelot and for the tobacco industry is that this collective paranoia about children’s illicit habits could lead to the age of responsibility for smoking and playing the Lottery being raised to 18, the same as for buying alcohol.

That would seriously damage their wealth.