Helping protect children by banning payday loan ads before the watershed

Monkeyballs

If Payday lenders are going to advertise then they should not be using what I can only describe as being 'Child friendly' formats.

A payday loan should be a last resort, take the last resort seriously and don't make it fun! If an advert which shows someone struggling and depressed and reaching out for 'last resort' lending then it probably won't attract a kids attention as much as a singing Satsuma!

As for gambling adverts, same deal... Dancing foxes, inflating women and Babs Windsor going on about big balls might be attractive to their target audience but also to kids too who honestly shouldn't be getting their first exposure to the joys of gambling by seemingly innocent and fun adverts.

MB

Chimaera724

We seem to be living in an era without personal responsibility where it is the responsibility for companies and Government to make our decisions for us and tell us what we can and cannot do.


We are fortunate that in this country we all went to school and all learnt what percentages are. We can all therefore understand what 2000% APR means. It should be your own personal responsibility to decide if 2000% APR is something that works for you.


In the same way we all need to bring up our kids knowing what right and wrong are and what we deem acceptable. We can't shield them until they are 18 and then expect them to make the correct decisions unaided.


Learning that you can't have it all now is one of life's key lessons.
We should be focusing on the individuals who are over committing themselves and not the companies.

catshark88

I respect the sentiments of free speech, avoiding a nanny state and parental responsibility voiced on some of the posts above.

However, these ads are often designed in a very juvenile way, espousing a devil may care attitude to borrowing money at ridiculous rates.

If many adults are "daft" enough to take advantage of such loans, is it really reasonable to expect that kids will not be similarly influenced?

The MSE forum is likely to be full of the very people who WOULD educate their children about money. The people gullible enough to take out these loans are hardly likely to be providing that education to their kids though (pre lightbulb moments).

I heartily support this campaign, given that we don't live in some Utopia where no advertising causes any harm.

Monkeyballs

I wonder if an advert featuring a cute teddy bear chatting to a winged unicorn standing at a bar discussing committing fraud while puffing away on cigarettes and knocking back shots of Jack Daniels out of babies bottles would be ok?

True it would suggest to kids that teddies and unicorns sometimes do bad things but surely it wouldn't appeal to them would they? Nahhh...

It's a product for adults so produce adverts for adults! Simples *squeek*

MB

ConsumerWizkid

Personally after seeing commercials as a child I now blindly act out based on the vivid memories I have of watching them on TV before bedtime at 9pm. I now murder people with my car after playing Grand Theft Auto at 15. My young impressionable mind just could not learn right from wrong after observing something so poignant!

Ban children from watching the news as well!! Children might act out on what they see and we simply cannot have that

moohound

Being currently off sick with pneumonia, I have been watching daytime TV, not something I often do, and to be honest the PDL ads seem to have dried up entirely and been replaced with subprime longer-term borrowing adverts like guarantor loans, singing citrus fruits and something called spring coin, maybe this is a sea-change in the market, and the 'pay it all back on payday' model is a dead duck anyway?