Claire Beale on Advertising

RIP, then, stuffing junk food advertisements down the nation's kids. Our precious little porkies are to be detoxed: no junk food ads targeting children. Well, not on television, anyway. But if your darling chubbly-wubbly spends any time on the internet then expect a new feast of junk food ads to be popping up between the cartoons and the games on a computer screen near you very soon.

Because that's the real danger of Ofcom's decision last week to ban all advertising of unhealthy food around kids' programmes and programmes that attract a high proportion of viewers under 16. All those advertisers who have lost the food fight will slink off to the web, where they'll find a captive audience of kids and none of the restrictions on advertising content that are so tiresome to television advertisers.

So Ofcom's decision is victory to the pressure groups and the politicians looking for a political scapegoat for the state of the nation's (ill) health. But what will it actually achieve? Well, it's a boon for the burgeoning internet medium. Like it needs it. And it's a blow to the ad industry, which now goes bloodied into the battle over booze advertising. But for the channels that make and show kids programming (and generally do it well, I think) it's a potential death sentence - Ofcom reckons the ban will cost TV companies £39 million in ad revenue.

It's interesting that Ofcom's pronouncement should come in the week that Vodafone announced a radical tie-up with Yahoo, to offer mobile phone customers cheaper deals in return for agreeing to watch adverts on its mobiles. Now you don't have to be a teenager without a Saturday job to work out that that's a pretty attractive deal. And you don't have to be a food advertiser kicked off TV and targeting teenagers to realise that that's a pretty attractive deal.

If you make billions selling unhealthy food to children this is a setback but not a catastrophe. As any media buyer will tell you, there are plenty of other ways of hitting your target these days. RIP junk food TV ads, long live our children? Don't bank on it.

* CLEARLY VODAFONE knows a thing or two about canny marketing. At a London seminar last week Vodafone's head of brand communications, Dominic Chambers, cited a chilling example of how easily advertisers can do without TV sometimes.

Vodafone's latest viral campaign has already been seen by 10 million people. That's a million or so more than tuned in to see David Gest bare his bosoms on the first night of I'm a Celebrity. The viral cost £25,000 to make. Most ad campaigns cost rather more (Vodafone will spend about £80m on advertising this year).

At last week's Internet Advertising Bureau conference, Bartle Bogle Hegarty's John Hegarty said the web wasn't a brand-building medium (yet). Maybe it never will be, in isolation. But reaching 10 million potential customers for £25,000 is a procurement director's wet dream. And possibly a creative agency's nightmare.

* IF YOU haven't seen what Mentos do to a bottle of Diet Coke, (don't you have a water cooler in your office?) you've missed out on one of the biggest internet phenomenons of the year.

Find out by typing Mentos into YouTube. And type in "Mentos drink" to discover why this is not a combination recommended for anyone who cares to keep the contents of their stomach to themselves. Put a packet of Mentos in a bottle of Diet Coke and you get an instantaneous sticky, brown fountain. Drink Diet Coke, eat Mentos and you get a similar effect from several orifices.

There are thousands of films on YouTube demonstrating the effects and it's become one of the most popular topics of internet traffic. In fact, you can't buy exposure like this. But for Coca-Cola and Mentos it has posed a dilemma: their brands have been a hot topic among their hard-to-reach target market. Great. But for all the wrong reasons.

So what do you do? Mentos embraced it, had fun with it, ran a Mentos Geyser competition on YouTube. Coke hid. Well, after grumbling that Diet Coke was supposed to be for drinking, it hid. But there's no hiding from consumers any more. The web has democratised brands and comment on brands. So there's been plenty of online chat about how badly Coke handled the entire affair. Coke - far from acting cool - appeared painfully po-faced and coldly corporate.

Now, belatedly, Coke's trying to join the party. It's launching its own Mentos experiment and a competition to find videos "exploring how ordinary objects move in extraordinary and beautiful ways" (OK, they couldn't quite rein in that po-faced corporate-ese, could they?)

As John Hegarty also said at last week's IAB gig, we're in an era when there's a whole load of new learning to be done, but the only way to progress is to get in there: "Most advertising operates in a culture of 'learn and do'. I think we're now in a culture of 'do and learn'." Coke appears to be slowly getting it: the web has empowered its consumers. They can't be beaten; there's no alternative but to join in. But can Coke really claw back credibility with the YouTube generation?

* TALKING ABOUT internet phenomena, the latest buzz around the ad industry is about a YouTube posting of a clip from The David Letterman Show. The clip is about 10 years old but it shows a big box full of coloured balls bouncing down one of those vertigo San Francisco streets. Sound familiar? The sort of churlish people who always ring me when they've spotted a vague similarity between a hugely successful ad and their own never-noticed, long-forgotten effort have got all over this one.

So Sony Bravia's "balls" ad by Fallon is a rip-off? Who cares. One is cheap television, the other is award-winning, punter-pleasing advertising. Next.

* LAST WEEK Engine, the marketing services group that is being built up around the WCRS creative agency, snared the global communications task for Nokia Siemens Networks. WCRS gets the advertising brief, Meme gets the digital brief, Dave gets the brand identity task. It's a pitch won against the rather mightier networks JWT and Publicis.

I've always thought the Engine proposition is a compelling one: all the advantages of integration across the marketing services mix, but with potentially fewer internal fiefdoms and self-interests than the bigger holding companies can claim. And a leaner, fleeter, more flexible approach to joined-up thinking.

But I've been rather sceptical about Engine's ability to offer "best in class" specialisms across the communications spectrum. The Nokia win suggests the key elements of the group really are starting to work together seamlessly to offer a convincing, broad service to blue-chip international advertisers. So that'll be a flotation for Engine in 2007, then?

BEALE'S BEST IN SHOW LYNX

According to chavscum.co.uk, Lynx is the deodorant for a certain type of unrefined male. But boy, does it give good advertising; slick, sexy and the geek always gets the girl. No wonder most blokes love it.

Eagle-eyed surfers will already have stumbled across the spanking new Lynx digital ad by Dare. And no doubt they'll be passing on the good news: this is absolutely true to the classy Lynx heritage, and then some. It's a great example of how an ad on the web can take a brand proposition built on TV and really amplify it.

So we have the beautiful girl. Of course we do. Scantily clad. Naturally. Now blow into the microphone on your computer and she shivers and squirms. Oh, and some of her clothes fly off. The harder you blow, the more chance you have of getting to the full monty.

This is a superb idea. Forget all those digital ads that are interactive just because they can be; here, the interactivity is integral to the idea. It might not be the first website to have grown men breathing heavily over their computer screens, but I bet it's the cleverest.

Claire Beale is editor of Campaign claire.beale@haymarket.com