Opinion: Perspective - Why adland needs to unite over food advertising.

It has been a crucial week for advertising freedom. The ad industry joined forces to make its do-or-die proposal to Ofcom on the future of food advertising to children.

Hours, days, weeks, months, even years of intense debate have gone into addressing the threat to the advertising of food and drinks brands to children on TV.

'I think the Government will look at it and think we're a bunch of c**ts,' one extremely senior, sweetly candid contributor to the submission said.

If this sounds defeatist, it's easy to see why. The whole issue has never really been about the impact of the advertising on the health of our youth.

And anything other than full surrender seems guaranteed to get Government teeth gnashing. Ofcom, many feel, is being put in an invidious position: asked to come up with a political solution to the issue rather than the right solution (are the two ever compatible?).

And won't any submission undersigned by the likes of McDonald's and Kellogg inevitably have hackles rising?

Given the intricacies of the political agenda, the industry has done a pretty fine job of finding a compromise. Agencies, media owners and advertisers this week joined forces to propose 'a fourth option'. This fourth option (as opposed to options one, two and three proposed by Ofcom) proposes a ban on all food and drinks advertising around terrestrial TV programmes aimed at under-nines; the (slender) lifeline is the additional proposal that food and drinks advertising should be allowed all day on the dedicated children's channels on cable and satellite, but restricted to 30 seconds an hour.