That Lineker is, according to everyone, an all-around nice guy, a player who never once drew a yellow card in his career, only adds to his irresistible charm.
Irresistible, indeed. According to researchers from the University of Liverpool, children who watched a Walkers commercial starring Lineker ate 40 percent more of the premium-brand potato chips than those who watched a non-Lineker food commercial. What’s more, children who, instead of being shown any food commercial, watched a clip of Lineker calling a football match ate just as many chips as their Walkers-ad-primed peers.
In other words, Lineker’s celebrity endorsement of Walkers crisps is so well established in the minds of pre-teens that simply seeing him onscreen, not as brand spokesman but as sports announcer, whets their appetite for the salty junk food.
The study, which appears in The Journal of Pediatrics, underscores the power of subliminal advertising and demonstrates just how plastic—and hence impressionable—the adolescent mind truly is.
The British researchers, led by Emma Boyland, showed 181 British children, aged 8 to 11, an episode of “The Simpsons,” interrupted by one of four ads: a Walkers spot, starring Lineker; a non-Walkers savory-food ad (Nobby’s Nuts); a clip of Lineker presenting soccer highlights on “Match of the Day”; or a control toy ad.
Afterward, the children were given bowls of both Walker’s and supermarket brand crisps, and told to eat as many as they liked, with unlimited refills.
Kids who were shown the Walkers ad ate 40 percent more name-brand chips than kids who saw the ad for Nobby’s Nuts, and 75 percent more than kids who saw the toy ad. The remarkable finding, however, was that kids who only watched Lineker talk soccer—no mention of food whatsoever—ate just as many chips as the direct-marketing group; indeed, they nearly won out as being the biggest gluttons. Lineker’s celebrity status is apparently so powerful—and so well-tied to the Walkers brand—that his endorsement sells chips even when he’s not trying to. Call it “advertising through osmosis.”
That celebrities acquire a kind of universal appeal is nothing new. As Eric Schlosser reported in “Fast Food Nation,” Ronald McDonald is the second-most-recognizable face in America, behind Santa Claus; 96 percent of kids know his name.
Still, it’s unnerving that children can be made brand loyalists—proto-consumers, really—from such a young age. If it’s so easy to get them to eat junk food, well, what else might ad execs teach them to swallow?
It's running Android 4.1 version of Jelly Bean rather than the very latest 4.2, but we're promised an upgrade soon. It looks different from other Jelly Bean handsets though, because this is the first we've seen of version 5 of HTC's justly lauded Sense interface. The UI is lush, and can be a bit processor-heavy, but the One can cope with it and then some. There's just one other home page on the HTC One out of the box, but you can add others as you need them (up to five) and fill them with a variety of shortcuts and widgets.
HTC has lost the Android multi-tasking button from the bottom of the screen. There's just home and back buttons, and for multi-tasking you'll need to press twice on the home button, or hold it down to bring up the intuitive Google Now search feature. You can also double press the HTC logo in the middle to bring up the shortcuts menu. All well and good, but not very intuitive -- there's a bit of a learning curve to get the hang of this phone.
HTC BlinkFeed offers a Flipboard-type service that pulls together your favourite media and social networking updates into a magazine-style interface, which displays in various sized tiles for you to scroll through. It's a fun way to keep up with what's happening, but the news feeds are limited -- you can only use the ones that HTC has approved -- and it doesn't really offer any improvements on Flipboard, which is available for free from Google Play. It's not bad, but weirdly, you've got no choice in the matter, since you can't take it off or replace it with something else.
There are lots of photo features to play with too, including smile capture, HDR, Sweep Panorama and something called Zoe Mode, which allows you to take a three-second video consisting of 20 frames -- you can then either save it as a video clip, or you can pick the best still shot. There's also a range of photo editing facilities and effects too.
The video camera can shoot in full 1080p HD resolution and unusually, the HDR effect is also available here, though the picture quality drops noticeably, making it seem like more of a gimmick.
The HTC One packs a lot of power, and it's good to see a sizeable battery on hand to help maintain the high performance for longer than a few blinks. Unfortunately, though it does well, the 2,300mAh power pack doesn't excel -- it should just about get you through a day's worth of heavy use, but not much more.
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