We try to teach our children to respect family traditions. They tell
our children to "have it your way." We struggle to teach our
children how to restrain themselves. They tell our children to "just
do it." We work hard to help our children understand that virtue
and character matter. They tell our children that "thirst is everything,
obey your thirst." They have at their disposal multi-billion dollar
budgets, the increasingly powerful tools of old and new media, and the
skills of some of the most knowledgeable and inventive minds in the nation.
We have ourselves, our overworked families, and our often fragmented communities.
Mothers and fathers who struggle to raise good children in an evermore
complex culture face stiff competition from advertisers and marketers,
and the competition is about to get stiffer and the stakes even higher.
Advertising people call it the competition for "share of mind"--
the quest to get inside our children's heads to persuade them to buy and
to nag us into buying. This fierce competition goes well beyond our decisions
to buy one product or another. It is a competition that will decide who
will raise our children, who will determine their values, who will shape
their characters.
Children "represent more market potential than any other demographic
segment," according to James U. McNeal, a professor of marketing
at Texas A&M University and a leading expert on the children's market.
They are a sought-after demographic because, in addition to making their
own purchases, they have a powerful and growing influence over their parents'
buying decisions, and they hold great promise as future adult consumers.
In 1998 alone, children ages 4 to 12 spent approximately $27 billion of
their own money and 12- to19-year-olds spent $94 billion. Children directly
influenced about $200 billion in parental purchases.
With the prospect of more and more revenue from the booming children's
market, advertisers and marketers now spend over $2 billion each year
on advertising to children, more than 20 times what they spent 10 years
ago. The goal, as McNeal describes it, is "growing customers from
childhood." Wayne Chilicki, an executive at General Mills, put it
this way during the Promotion Marketing Association's Star Power '98 conference:
"When it comes to targeting kid consumers, we at General Mills follow
the Proctor & Gamble model of 'cradle to grave.' We believe in getting
them early and having them for life." Chilicki echoed the sentiments
of Mike Searles, former president of Kids 'R' Us, who said in 1989 that
advertisers "understand something that is very basic and logical,
that if you own this child at an early age, you can own this child for
years to come. ...Companies are saying, 'Hey, I want to own the kid younger
and younger and younger.'"
In their quest to "own" our children, advertisers are breaking
through barriers once considered unassailable and resorting to evermore
manipulative strategies.
According to a 1999 article in kidScreen, an online industry newsletter,
"There have never been more ways in the culture to support marketing
toward kids, and there have never been more outlets to study how to speak
to them. That makes the competition for kids' attention significantly
greater, forcing advertisers to work harder to get inside kids' heads."
To a growing number of advertisers and marketers, children are nothing
but a lucrative market to be exploited. These firms are more than willing
to take full advantage of our children's vulnerabilities in order to maximize
profits. And the competition is intense.
Advertisers think nothing of stirring up our children's antisocial urges.
They do not hesitate to use shocking and base humor to grab our children's
attention. "Taboos: flatulence, saying bad words, making fun of adults
or people's physical imperfections, are good for a laugh because they
are representative of all the things that kids are forbidden to do,"
wrote Chris McKee, chief creative officer of the marketing agency, the
Geppetto Group, last year in kidScreen. Gene Del Vecchio, author of Creating
Ever-Cool: A Marketer's Guide To a Kid's Heart, notes that, "Cool
can also be forbidden.
As kids get to the tween and teen ages and the desire for independence
and rebellion raises its head, cool can become those things that are too
edgy, too rebellious by many parents' standards."
Advertisers are colonizing every available space in the name of marketing
-- from elevators to churches to airports to ATM machines to restrooms;
no place is off-limits. Schools are especially favored targets. Advertisers
are invading public educational institutions with wall-to-wall advertising
in hallways, cafeterias, and libraries. They are gaining access to classrooms
with a range of advertiser-supported materials. Every day, Channel One
delivers 10 minutes of news and two minutes of ads to approximately 12,000
schools and 8 million students. And Zap Me!, which provides interactive
advertisements to students through the computers that it offers to schools,
now has access to about 1.2 million children and plans to reach close
to 10 million children by 2001.
Our children's classrooms are the main sites for a growing industry that
invades our children's privacy and subverts the educational mission: in-school
market research. Innovation Focus, a Lancaster, Pa., research firm, boasts
of its ability to "explore the hopes, wishes, and dreams of children
and to apply those discoveries to the growth of [a client's] business."
Margaret Owens, a director of discovery and innovation at the firm, contends
that schools are popular places for research on children because young
people "are most comfortable on their own turf with their peers.
That level of comfort, especially with children, is important in getting
honest, open communication."
Advertisers and marketers are relying to an unprecedented degree on the
potent tools of psychology to probe our children's minds and emotions
to exploit them. The level of psychological manipulation of children by
these industries is so great that late last year a group of 60 psychologists
from diverse institutions declared that it had reached "crisis"
proportions. In a letter addressed to the American Psychological Association
(APA), the psychologists denounced the increasing use of psychological
knowledge to commercially exploit and manipulate children. The letter,
drafted by Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert, an advocacy group that opposes
advertising and marketing excesses, and Allen Kanner, a clinical psychologist
at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, Calif., noted that this practice
is "reaching epidemic levels. The result is an enormous advertising
and marketing onslaught that comprises, arguably, the largest single psychological
project ever undertaken." A spokesperson for the APA says it plans
to appoint a task force to explore the issues raised in the letter and
to make recommendations for action.
Meanwhile, the onslaught continues. With the formidable resources at
their command, advertisers are targeting our children at younger and younger
ages with the avowed purpose of turning them into lifelong consumers.
At a March 2000 conference in New York called "Play-Time, Snack-Time,
Tot-Time: Targeting Pre-Schoolers and Their Parents," leading advertisers,
marketers, and programmers met for two days to share strategies for creating
"brand loyalty" in the preschool market. They talked about "new
media for the 0 to 3" age group, and how to "capitalize on the
growing cognitive, emotional, and persuasive strengths of a younger than
ever segment by targeting these youngest kids directly."
It seems that advertisers will stop at nothing when it comes to the competition
for a share of our children's minds. The problem, as mothers and fathers
well know, is that advertisers are not just selling products, they are
selling a world-view. They are promoting a value system that thousands
of times each day bombards our children with messages that glorify self-indulgence,
instant gratification, an ethic of "me first," and what Debbie
Weber, a professor of marketing and advertising, has called the "gotta-have-it
or gimme attitude." These are values flatly at odds with the values
that responsible parents seek to teach their children. In fact, what mothers
and fathers teach, advertisers and marketers aggressively undermine. Little
wonder that in poll after poll Americans express deep concerns that our
children are becoming more materialistic, rude, and undisciplined, and
are losing touch with basic notions of civility.
A strong and growing body of psychological evidence indicates that people
who watch a great deal of television, with its incessant stream of commercials,
have more materialistic values, and that materialistic values are associated
with increased depression, anxiety, substance abuse, interpersonal problems,
and antisocial behavior. According to Allen Kanner and Timothy Kasser,
two of the psychologists who signed last year's letter to the American
Psychological Association, "studies on 'materialism' show that individuals
highly focused on materialistic values also report less satisfaction with
life...worse interpersonal relationships, more drug and alcohol abuse,
and less contribution to community...[and this process contributes] to
the formation of a shallow 'consumer identity' that is obsessed with instant
gratification and material wealth."
To be sure, advertisers and marketers are not solely responsible for
this problem. But with billions spent each year on psychological studies
and advertising designed to promote explicitly antisocial values, advertisers
should no longer be allowed to avoid their share of responsibility. In
the competition for share of mind, mothers and fathers seem to be losing.
But it is not too late to fight back. Advertisers need to know that they
cannot own our children. They should not be free to continue to pervert
our children's values. They should not be permitted to exploit our children
in their classrooms. They should not be allowed to use the techniques
of psychology to manipulate our children. They should be prohibited from
targeting our babies and toddlers.
What can be done? One answer is for Congress to give the Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) full authority to undertake a comprehensive rule-making
on advertising and marketing to children. In the late 1970s, the staff
of the FTC proposed restrictions on advertising aimed at young children
on the theory that such advertising is inherently unfair. Congress responded
by passing the Federal Trade Commission Improvements Act of 1980, which,
among other things, prohibited the commission from promulgating "any
rule [asserting] that such advertising constitutes an unfair act or practice."
This tied the commission's hands. Although the statute's reach is unclear,
it remains on the books and is an impediment to an unfettered and vigorous
FTC response to the growing abuses in advertising to children.
As a first step in safeguarding our children, this law should be repealed.
The hands of the FTC should be untied to permit it to deal aggressively
with what has now become a profound threat to our children and our society.
Furthermore, Congress should direct the FTC to initiate a broad-based
rule-making to protect children from harmful advertising, and it should
provide adequate funding to permit the FTC to carry out this task with
a sense of urgency for the well-being of our nation's children.
Even more than a competition for a share of our children's minds, this
is a competition for a share of their souls.
