It’s not often that I’m tempted to hold up something David Cameron says as sensible, but – pinching myself as I go – I agree with the prime minister when he says: “Every day... some businesses are dumping a waste that is toxic on our children. Products and marketing that can warp their minds and their bodies and harm their future.” Cameron was referring specifically to the sexualisation of children through advertising, but I reckon if pressed, he’d also sensibly note that there are other issues at stake – that the commercialisation of children can have drastic impacts on society and the environment, too. (And, as the head of the ‘greenest government ever’, Mr Cameron would surely worry.)

There’s no doubt that people of all ages are being exposed to an ever-increasing amount of advertising – a 2005 textbook on advertising notes that the average American is exposed to between 500 and 1,000 adverts a day, and current estimates in the UK go as high as 3,000. And with the growth of the internet, advertising is becoming even more pervasive, more difficult to regulate, and more cleverly disguised.

A 2007 study for the National Consumer Council investigated the 40 sites most visited by children in the UK. With the obvious exception of the BBC sites, the vast majority – 95 per cent – contained commercial content, much of it deemed inappropriate for children. Dr Agnes Nairn, one of the report’s authors tells me that in recent years: “The amount of advertising to children has unquestionably gone up because most of it has now moved online... and children are spending more and more time online, and most of what they’re looking at is commercialised.”

And while ‘traditional’ TV adverts, say, are quite well regulated, this is not necessarily the case with online commercial content. The Committee of Advertising Practice Code is a voluntary, self-regulatory agreement with a number of specific codes for children that should, in theory, protect kids online, but doesn’t always do so in practice. Nairn explains: “For example, things like adverts aren’t supposed to encourage children to pester their parents. Now, there’s a practice called ‘Wish Lists’, which sites like Barbie and Bratz have, which looks to me pretty much like pestering because you make up a list of the things that you want and then you send them to your parents, by email.

“It’s very difficult to police of course, because content can come from anywhere, so it can come from the States where the regulations are different, so it’s very difficult to keep track of it all.”

What’s more, the sorts of ads kids are exposed to are becoming more and more difficult to recognise as ‘ads’ in the traditional sense. While researchers agree that children learn to distinguish between television adverts and programmes by around three or four years of age, and can identify persuasive intent by seven, newer forms of marketing are becoming more and more difficult to pick out (and defend against). Practices such as branded ‘advergames’ online, which encourage children “to make an association between the brand and having fun”, and which often aren’t labelled as ads, are on the rise. Viral marketing, peer-to-peer marketing (whereby celebrities and others are paid as ‘brand ambassadors’, for example) and behavioural targeting are all on the increase and may make it harder for kids to recognise commercial content.

So, the amount of advertising kids are exposed to has increased, but what impact does this actually have on their desires and behaviours? Advertisers will tell you that they don’t create desires, merely influence which brands people choose to fulfil their existent desires. They will also point out their ineptitude when it comes to convincing children to buy things; as the government’s 2009 report ‘The Impact on the Commercial World on Children’s Wellbeing’ sums up: ‘Marketers will frequently suggest that children are a volatile market. They may complain about their unpredictability, representing them as hard-to-reach, and even as fickle and capricious; or they may pay tribute to their discernment and “media-savvy” skills. Marketers will also point to the high proportion of newly-advertised children’s products that apparently fail to gain a market.’ It’s enough to make you wonder why they’d waste nearly £4 billion a year advertising to these fickle, discerning British children who are seemingly impervious to their powers of persuasion...

There is, of course, another school of thought, one rather disdainfully summed up by Brian Sutton-Smith in his book Toys as Culture way back in 1986. On the subject of toy advertisements, he notes: ‘A socialist cynic would say that in addition to teaching children capitalist habits of consumption and waste, and teaching children to grow up with their self-esteem tied to the receiving of novel and unnecessary gifts or toys, we are teaching them the addiction of novelty. By constantly changing the toys presented to children, it might be said we are educating them in distraction, teaching them never to pay enduring attention to any particular thing, because other more novel items will soon arrive.’

Call me a socialist cynic, but I’d say there’s no doubt that advertising and its attendant materialist culture encourage children to acquire things they don’t need that will eventually be cast aside into a large pile of waste once the novelty’s worn off. The Institute of Chartered Accountants rather elegantly sums up this viewpoint (with regards to both children and adults) in a recent report on sustainability and economic growth: ‘Since human needs are finite, but human greed is not, economic growth can usually be maintained through the artificial creation of needs through advertising. The goods that are produced and sold in this way are often unneeded, and therefore are essentially waste. Moreover, the pollution and depletion of natural resources generated by this enormous waste of unnecessary goods is exacerbated by this waste of energy and materials in inefficient production processes.’

While this may seem commonsensical, hard evidence for it is surprisingly lacking (the government’s 2009 report on children’s wellbeing notes: ‘it’s hard to find convincing evidence about the impact of the commercial world on children’). There are, however, some studies that prove that there is a link between seeing more adverts and buying or consuming more things. Scientists at Yale University, for instance, devised experiments that showed that children who were exposed to food adverts consumed 45 per cent more junk food than children who were spared food advertising.

Whether directly caused by advertising or not, there’s no doubt that Western children today own more stuff than they used to. In 2007, the UK came bottom of a UNICEF report on child wellbeing in rich countries, with inequality and materialism cited as primary reasons. Dr Agnes Nairn and Ipsos Mori were subsequently commissioned to produce ethnographies for children in the UK, Spain and Sweden to dig deeper into issues affecting their wellbeing. She tells me: “It was amazing, in the houses we went into, kids just had boxes and boxes of broken toys. That weren’t played with anymore… It’s all so cheap, isn’t it? Kids just have so much stuff!”

And it’s not just the comic books and odd dolls of the days of yore; of particular concern these days is the rise of electronics in the kids’ market: ownership of mobile phones is quickly reaching saturation point with over 90 per cent of 11-16 year olds owning (at least) one mobile phone, and last year preschool ‘electronic learning’ rose by an astonishing 43 per cent, according to research for the International Council of Toy Industries. Indeed, one in every 11 UK children aged three to six received a ‘toy’ tablet for Christmas in 2011.

The Ipsos MORI/Nairn report states: ‘Children from all backgrounds across the UK and Sweden (although less so in Spain) mentioned [wanting] technological items and gadgets such as new phones, iPods, laptops and game consoles. Children were very specific about the brands and models that they desired, and these were nearly always the most recent releases which were undoubtedly the most heavily advertised.’ One nine-year-old girl is tellingly quoted in the report as saying: “I want a Blackberry Bold and I want an iPhone 5, when it’s out. I don’t know why, I just want them. I’m going to join the queue with my dad when it first comes out.” The report suggests this is because gadgets have become ‘the latest form of “status item” which denotes their membership of a social group, or marks them out as special’. Nairn elaborates: “If you’re buying an iPhone, you can’t just have the iPhone, you’ve got to have the iPhone 28, or whatever. And so the whole kind of product obsolescence, particularly proliferated by Apple, I would say, unquestionably leads to kids buying more stuff, and an awful lot more waste.”

This trend is of particular concern not just because the toys and gadgets will become obsolete so quickly (and so become waste) but also because they create so much waste in the production process. WRAP statistics show that, in general, every tonne of product that reaches the market requires 10 tonnes of fuel and materials to produce. For electronics, this figure is even larger: author Rachel Botsman claims the amount of waste generated for a single laptop is 4,000 times its weight.

And so a whole generation of children who have to have the latest gadget and who must upgrade every year will wind up creating a whole lot of waste, and will, in many cases, carry these habits into adulthood. I ask Nairn whether efforts to create brand loyalty amongst children work, and she replies: “Oh god, yes! No question about it. I mean, if you think of the Jesuits’ saying ‘Give me a child till he’s seven...’, you know if you can inculcate brand loyalty in a very young child, then they’ll carry on buying that brand, undoubtedly... It is much more cost effective than it is to gain a new client, by a ratio of about seven to one.”

Now, at this point, you might be thinking that parents have a role to play in all this – ‘I want’ doesn’t get, after all. And of course, you’re right. It’s not just the commercialisation of children that is at fault for this, but the commercialisation of adults as well. When I ask Nairn for suggestions on how to get kids buying (or receiving) fewer things they don’t need, her immediate response is: “Parents need to have more power.” She adds: “You ask parents: ‘Do you feel under pressure from the commercial world?’ And they all say yes, but they feel that everybody else is buying the stuff so they should be too. And I think one of the reasons that they feel everybody else is doing it is simply the social norms that are created through the amount of advertising there is. I mean, if you see iPads being advertised absolutely everywhere, you do think that everybody in the universe has got one. And that’s very difficult to fight against.”

What’s more, Nairn says that just as the highest predictor of whether you’ll be a smoker or not is whether your parents smoke, so it is with materialism: “If you’re living in a household where material goods are seen as the most important thing, chances are that you’re going to adopt those sorts of attitudes as well. I mean, also, it’s tied in with inequality, so if you’ve been brought up in poverty and you haven’t been able to afford stuff, if you are then able to afford things for your children, you tend to go over the top. So, parents who remember being left out because they didn’t have the right trainers will move heaven and earth to buy those for their kids.”

The coalition government has committed to take action to reduce the commercialisation and sexualisation of children, and as a first step commissioned Reg Bailey to report on the issue. In the resulting paper, ‘Letting Children Be Children’, he concludes that a healthy society ‘would not need to erect barriers between age groups to shield the young: it would, instead, uphold and reinforce healthy norms for adults and children alike, so that excess is recognised for what it is and there is transparency about its consequences’. It seems that in a world permeated by advertising, some businesses are “dumping a waste that is toxic” on all of us, and it’s time to take action to reduce the commercialisation of the whole society. I await a sensible plan with baited breath.