Ottawa, Ontario
June 11, 2015
Scott Hutton, Executive Director, Broadcasting
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
Check against delivery
Mr. Chairman and Honourable Senators,
Thank you for inviting us to provide input into your study on the increasing incidence of obesity in Canada. My name is Scott Hutton and I am the Executive Director of Broadcasting at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). With me today is Nanao Kachi, Director of Social and Consumer Policy.
The CRTC is acutely aware of the profound ability of the media to influence consumer behaviour. And although our role is to regulate broadcasters under the Broadcasting Act, we are nonetheless committed to supporting policies that fight obesity and unhealthy food behaviours. We are pleased to lend our expertise to this important cause. As you will hear in a moment, we play a number of important roles in ensuring that media advertising meets applicable standards.
We have been asked to speak on the subject of advertising directed at children. Let me begin by saying that although the CRTC does not directly regulate advertising content, we do intervene when it comes to basic standards for advertising aimed at Canadians aged 12 years and younger.
The CRTC requires that broadcasters adhere to the Broadcast Code for Advertising to Children. This document was created by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters in association with Advertising Standards Canada. Its purpose is to help advertisers and advertising agencies recognize the special characteristics of children as an audience group when preparing commercial messages. As I’m sure you can imagine, children—and very young children in particular—often have a hard time differentiating between real life and imaginary situations. The Broadcast Code for Advertising to Children requires that content aimed at this age group respect, and not exploit, the power of a child’s imagination.
The code is just one tool the industry uses to measure the appropriateness of advertising to children. Another is the Canadian Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative. Agreed to by some of Canada’s largest food and beverage companies and administered by Advertising Standards Canada, the program asks participants to re-think their approaches to marketing products to children under the age of 12. Rather than promoting junk food, participants are asked to market only products that are more in keeping with the principles of good nutrition: those lower in total calories, fats, salts and added sugars, and higher in nutrients. Importantly, the initiative applies to online and mobile forums as well as conventional television broadcasting.
The other check in our system is advertising pre-clearance, a service performed by Advertising Standards Canada and which is mandatory for all advertising aimed at children. Through it, a committee is tasked with reviewing all broadcast and print children’s advertising to ensure that content meets specific mandatory and guideline criteria. I should add that my colleague, Mr. Kachi, is a member of this committee.
Such measures are working. As you know, the CRTC collects and addresses complaints made by Canadians about the appropriateness of content aired by broadcasters. In 2014–15, we received over 2,800 complaints related to television programming. Of those, only 30—or less than 1% of the complaints—concerned advertising directed at children. Importantly, none of those related to junk food, or any other types of products commonly associated with childhood obesity.
Honourable Senators, I understand that one of the measures your committee is considering is whether television advertising to children should be banned. If I may, I would like to share my thoughts with you on the future of the television industry. My insight may help guide your recommendations.
You may have heard of the work being done by the CRTC through our Let’s Talk TV conversation. In it, we asked Canadians about the future of television: how they connect with content, in particular. The conversation revealed many important ideas, none more so than the fact that Canadians value television, but the way in which they interact with it is changing. Viewers are migrating to watching content on non-traditional platforms that many of us in this room would never have imagined possible even 10 years ago. Rather than sitting down to watch television in their living rooms during primetime or in the late-night time slot, they watch anything they want on their phones, their tablets and their computers—and at times of the day that suit them best, rather than on schedules and in sequences arranged by broadcasters. In today’s television age, content is abundant. It’s everywhere and available to anyone whenever he or she wants.
Young people, more so than older Canadians, are at the forefront of such change. Statistics from the September 25, 2014 Media Technology Monitor Study confirm my point, Honourable Senators. Nearly 60 percent of Anglophones with a child at home own a tablet computer; more than 80 percent own smartphones. Better than one in four Canadian families owns four screens than can access the Internet. More than three in four Canadians with kids own a game console that connects to the Internet. And, among those families that subscribe to online video on demand services, the children are the primary users of those accounts.
The youth are those who adopt and embrace new technologies more readily than those of us who maybe set in our ways. They are the ones for whom conventional models of television consumption appear tired and out-dated. They are the ones for whom all of us in the television industry—creators, producers, distributors, advertisers, and yes even us regulators—must adapt our service strategies. Because, and this is key, tools such as broadcast quotas and genre protection that worked well in yesterday’s television era where viewers consumed content in a linear fashion—that is, on set schedules and conventional channels—do not work nearly as well in today’s on-demand age where content is abundant and available to anyone at any time of day and on any platform.
In the digital world, Canadians and children in particular are well served through digital literacy and education tools. Consider, for example, the work of MediaSmarts, an independent organization that helps parents, teens and children develop and enhance the critical thinking skills they use when interacting with media.
In the television world of the future—and in today’s television world, empowering Canadians—young and old—with the skills they need to be responsible media consumers is an important goal.
Thank you.
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