Claire Beale on Advertising

There's more money in cutting salt than in adding cartoon characters

Yah-boo-sucks to Which? and all the loudmouthed minority groups that continuously trash brands for making us fat.

The anti-advertising lobby's portrayal of the big evil brand funnelling bad stuff down our throats in pursuit of fatter revenues couldn't be further from the truth. A new report into the country's most successful products proves that manufacturers are jumping on the healthy-eating bandwagon and winning sales because of it.

Despite so much recent pillorying, brands such as Walkers crisps and Coca-Cola are booming. Not because they are cramming us with fat-inducing ingredients, as the pressure groups would have us believe, but because they are tailoring their products to the health-conscious market.

According to Marketing magazine's survey from the research giant TNS Worldwide, healthy eating has been the dominant trend influencing the contents of our shopping baskets over the last 12 months. Awareness campaigns, high-profile advertising and improved food labelling have encouraged us to make healthier choices in our weekly shop.

By reducing the fat content of its crisps, Walkers has become the nation's third-biggest supermarket brand (behind Kellogg's and Heinz), with sales of over £490m. And Coca-Cola, a brand you might think couldn't get any bigger, is enjoying sales that are up 7 per cent to £430m, thanks to new health-conscious lines such as Coke Zero.

Unfortunately, this good news, that healthier brands can enjoy healthy profits, got rather damagingly overshadowed last week by a report from the consumer group Which?. It lashed out at the use of cartoon characters to sell children's products. But surely, the pressure group's focus – after diet, exercise and parental responsibility, and quite a few other proven causes of obesity – should be on encouraging food manufacturers to create the healthiest possible brands. I guarantee, if the TNS research is correct, that if there's money to be made from healthier products, manufacturers won't require much encouragement.

No doubt the rabid anti-advertising contingent will leap upon a new study from the US into childhood consumerism, a subject that has, unhelpfully, become such an emotive issue in the UK. Just as British advertising and marketing is in constant battle over targeting youngsters, so the US food, drinks and toy companies are now coming under similar pressure. In the UK, we've already got a so-called junk-food ad ban, and vocal pressure groups such as Which? trying to halt all sorts of marketing initiatives aimed at children. Now the Americans are feeling the heat, too.

Calls for similar ad restrictions on the other side of the Atlantic will no doubt be fuelled by this new report, which claims that, in a test, children aged between three and five displayed clear brand preference towards the demonised McDonald's.

The test, by Stanford University School of Medicine, was a pretty crude one. The children were presented with identical foods, one in a McDonald's wrapper, one not. The food inside was the same, but the children said that the branded one tasted better. Clearly, in America at least, brand-awareness starts early. But I suspect that if the children had been offered a carrot wrapped in a McD wrapper and a naked McNugget, they'd choose the McNugget every time.

So, should we be worried that youngsters prefer things wrapped in colourful paper, perhaps with a logo they recognise? Surely the study says more about their sophisticated appreciation of packaging and design than it does about the evil of McDonald's. But then, that conclusion wouldn't quite suit the questioner's agenda, would it.

Now for a 120-year-old brand that's about to be given a very 21st-century marketing overhaul. Agatha Christie might still be the world's bestselling author, but she's about to be subjected to the most modern of commercial techniques to bring her right up to date. Next month sees the launch of Agatha Christie Week, marking the 70th anniversary of Death on the Nile, and the beginning of a series of marketing initiatives to make the author-brand appeal to younger readers.

So, this being 2007, we will have Agatha Christie comic-strip books, a souped-up website with a new Death on the Nile game to download, and there's even talk of an Agatha Christie doll. But busting the clapometer in youth-appeal is the placement of Christie herself in the next series of Doctor Who. She will be played by Fenella Woolgar, and Doctor Who's producer, Russell T Davies, says that for the Doctor, the episode will be a "meeting of minds". Since product placement is not (yet) officially allowed on TV, and there should be no commercial parrying on the BBC, we must assume that it's not also the meeting of cheque books.

How convenient, then, that the good Doctor has coincidentally chosen Agatha Christie as a co-star when her brand is looking for a marketing fillip.

Talking of product placement, a few weeks ago I wrote about the new internet soap-opera phenomenon, as summed up by Bebo's KateModern. The commercial angle is that KateModern (a video diary of an art student and her crazy life) is peppered with product placement of brands keen to figure out what this new medium might mean for advertisers. Oh, and whether it might actually sell products.

If you watch this week, you'll see how Buena Vista is placing its products. Hands up, I'll never be a media strategist: I assumed that we'd see Kate awkwardly visiting the cinema and a big Buena Vista logo looming. But the guys behind this particular product placement have come up with something smarter.

They're promoting BV's new movie, Hallam Foe, by product-placing its star, Jamie Bell (of Billy Elliot fame), in the KateModern drama. Bell will be making a cameo appearance in the interactive drama series across several episodes, and viewers will be able to interact with his character and post messages about his involvement in the plot.

This is a classic commercial win-win situation. Bebo gets film stars (hopefully with fans, who will now check out Bebo), and BV gets to generate some buzz around its new release.

It's a sign of how sophisticated advertisers are becoming in the new media. I'd like to bet that if BV was involved in a bit of illicit product placement on TV, it would be a fairly crude, clumsy affair. But the power of the web to develop new sorts of customer relationship is encouraging everyone involved in the commercial strategy to dig deep for new ideas. We'll have to wait and see whether Doctor Who and the BBC manage something equally innovative with their (utterly uncommercial) Christie tie-in.

Beale's best in show gun crime (abbott mead vickers BBDO)

There is so much gun crime, and its desperately sad consequences, reported in the media at the moment that there's a danger of people starting to tune out.

Of course, this must not be allowed to happen. The radio station Choice FM is campaigning to keep the issue at the top of the agenda, and has launched a TV ad designed to cut through the noise. Launching around the Notting Hill Carnival, Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO's ad chillingly amplifies the anti-gun message. It's shot on a phantom camera, which captures 10,000 frames a second. We see a bullet being shot through an egg, a glass of milk, an apple, all in slow, mesmerising motion. Then we see the bullet travelling towards the head of a boy. We know the rest.

The effect is stunning, beautiful, interesting and, crucially, powerful. It's not targeting the perpetrators of gun crime; there's nothing gritty or ghetto about this ad. It has an operatic soundtrack, for heaven's sake. But it is targeting people like you and me, people who might otherwise stand by helplessly, allowing the wave of gun-crime stories to wash over them without feeling a duty to act.

My only gripe is that there is, actually, no call to action. Simply the line, "Stop the bullets. Kill the gun", and a Choice FM logo saying Peace on the Streets. You've got my attention, now where do I sign up?

Claire Beale is editor of 'Campaign' claire.beale@haynet.com