Claire Beale on Advertising

The Michelin man is having lipo on his spare tyres. Cadbury is launching a new range of "healthy" sweeties. Mars is calling a halt to marketing to kids.

Yes, adland's healthy eating bandwagon rolled on apace last week, and as the junk food ad ban looms ever closer, some advertisers are realising that the ad-ban cloud could have a gold lining.

To recap: there's going to be a ban on all TV advertising of unhealthy foods to children. Sounds simple. Unnecessary, ill-conceived and utterly ineffective, maybe, but simple. Except that it's not. Working out what constitutes junk involves an alchemic formula that few understand and fewer can justify.

Raisins, Marmite and cheese have now been deemed too dangerous to advertise to our children. Meanwhile white bread, chicken nuggets and diet colas are healthy enough to escape the ban and will no doubt be aggressively advertising themselves to our little dumplings for many years to come.

But some advertisers are now waking up to the fact that all this junk food stuff could actually prove a new commercial opportunity. We're a nation obsessed with our weight; let's face it, there's plenty to obsess about. And it doesn't take a Richard Branson to spot a shameless marketing opportunity in that.

Take the Michelin man. Now you might think that you tinker with such a famous brand icon at your peril. After all, Michelin man was voted advertising icon of the 20th century by the FT. And don't forget the sorry example of Little Chef. No sooner was the fat boy said to be slimming than the brand itself started going man-boobs up.

Undaunted and no doubt excited by the chance of getting in on a little health-conscious PR action, Michelin man is shedding a few spare tyres because "it shows the evolution of people and is a way of keeping up with changes in society". Surely the truth is that cuddly old Michelin man was too firm a reminder of the state of the nation's waistbands and that's something we simply don't want to be reminded about while scoffing beneath a couple of Michelin stars.

But it's not just the icons that are changing. Some manufacturers are rethinking their entire product portfolios in acknowledgement of the health wave. Cadbury and Mars might be more than a little responsible for the wobble on the national thigh but can't ignore either the governmental pressure on unhealthy snacks or the marketing opportunity to move into healthier territory. Both are working on new health-conscious ranges: Cadbury is plotting a healthy sweets line (no artificial flavours or preservatives), which it hopes to launch by the end of the year, while Mars is running away with itself, declaring it will not be advertising to under-12s (like it will have a choice before year-end) except to peddle a new healthy range to the over-nines.

This, potentially, is the positive effect of the ad ban combined with our raised consciousness of fat as a health issue. Advertisers such as Cadbury and Mars know that they can no longer overtly target kids with many of their current products (on TV at least ... though who doubts the ban will spread?). Launching new healthier brands that don't get caught in the ad ban net is good news for the manufacturers, good for the broadcasters and, crucially, good for our children. And the fact that these new products will need a bit of advertising support means that it's good news for adland, too.

One of the many downsides of the junk food ad ban, though, is the impact it will have on the quality of children's programming on the commercial channels. Without the ad revenue it will be hard for the broadcasters to justify proper investment in quality children's shows.

Last week Ofcom launched a review of children's programming amid forecasts that the junk food ad ban will cost commercial broadcasters up to £40m in lost ad revenue. It's not hard to work out that if children's programming is not commercially lucrative for TV channels, they simply won't invest in it.

So the advertising body ISBA is throwing its weight behind the Ofcom inquiry in the hope that the quality and quantity of children's programming can be protected. For the time being there are plenty of advertisers who can legitimately target children and who want a quality programming environment in which to do so.

ITV has already retrenched from showing children's programming in its afternoon weekday segment and has already lobbied, unsuccessfully, to reduce the number of hours of children's programming it is required to show. If advertisers targeting children are not to be squeezed into a diet of cheap programming imports and a dwindling number of ad slots, the lobbying needs to start now.

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FROM THE TV screen to the mobile. There will be no shortage of ad agencies lining up to tilt at the £27m 3 mobile phone account. Not only is this a meaty piece of business - at least if 3 keeps spending at current levels - but it's also a great opportunity for some showcase creativity.

You'll be familiar with the weird, beautiful and surprising ads created for 3 by WCRS: the cowboys with the musical jellyfish; the singing cherry; the orgasmic housewives with their glowing orbs.

OK, when you put it like that, it's easy to see why some critics have described WCRS's 3 oeuvre as a classic case of style over substance: nice films with nothing to do with selling mobile services. That's not an entirely fair assessment of the work. At least not if your measure of the advertising's success is the number of subscribers they pulled in. In the three years since WCRS snaffled the account, 3 customers grew from a pitiful 250,000 to 3.5 million. But once signed up, it seems that 3's customers were really quite happy, thank you, simply making phone calls and sending texts. All the other (revenue-generating) fancy stuff turned out to be excess to requirements for most of us and price has proved the main driver of the market, not gizmos.

I suspect we may have seen the end of the luxurious brand-building 3 ads for a while, in favour of price-led promotions. And for the agencies eyeing the business it might not prove such a trophy account as it seems.

* IS ITV getting its mojo back? Anyone attending last week's Brit awards could be forgiven for thinking the answer is yes. OK, the Brit awards is hardly evidence of a rich new seam of enduring audience-pleasing programming, but there's no doubt that the ITV team was relieved that the event went off with aplomb and all agreed that no other commercial broadcaster could pull off such a big live show drawing such desirable youth viewers in such healthy numbers. Viewing levels were up by about a million on 2006 levels.

For a channel and an advertising sales team that has had its confidence severely tested, there was a bit of the old ITV swagger back last week, and for all the right reasons.

BEALE'S BEST IN SHOW: ORANGE (FALLON)

When the star of your ad campaign turns up on an eBay auction, you can be sure that your advertising is hitting some zeitgeist buttons. So it's surprising that Orange has junked the wind-up men (yours for £30 a pop on eBay) that starred in its last ad campaign.

But Orange has never been an advertiser keen on a consistent message and its new ad is different altogether from what has gone before. Different and rather mesmeric. Magic, in fact ... literally.

The ad, from Fallon, shows a man who keeps producing his friends and family out of thin air in the park. It's a hard ad to describe, this one. One minute the people are there, then with the flap of a coat tail, they've turned into someone else.

It looks like a post-production triumph using some computer graphic wizardry, but actually it is all done like a traditional magic act, by sleight of hand. This is definitely one of those ads you want to watch over and over, just to work out how it's done. In true 21st-century style, though, the "making-of" viral should soon be coming to a computer screen near you.