Advertising to Children

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Advertising to Children

• Impacts on a Future Generation of
  Citizen-Consumers?

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Texts and Topics

• Juliet Schor, Born to Buy The Commercialized
  Child and the New Consumer Culture (2004)
• Malcolm Gladwell, The Coolhunt (1997)
• Consuming Kids The Commercialization of
  Childhood (Media Education Foundation, 2008)

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Anti-adultism
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More than 1.6 billion is spent by food and
beverage companies each year on marketing
products to younger consumers, according to
Federal Trade Commission figures. Research
conducted by Yales Rudd Center for Food Policy
and Obesity found that Children prefer the
taste of foods branded with images of popular
cartoon characters and choose those foods more
often than unbranded ones.  This goes to show
that kids prefer a vibrant and fun product over a
mundane item. http//ajstrat.wordpress.com/2010/10
/20/new-forms-of-food-advertisements-are-reaching-
out-to-kids/. 10 Oct. 2010
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http//www.girlsintelligenceagency.com/
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Ad industrys three lines of defense

• they are empowering kids
• advertising to kids is necessary for the economic
  health of the industry
• parents are the guilty party

www.thebettermom.com
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Schor discusses Channel One, 86-88
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Decommercializing Childhood

• Advocate for legislation that would more highly
  regulate advertising and the media
• Become aware of the types of advertising
• taking place in schools
• Become more aware of commercialization in the home

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• Why do your clients hire you guys? What are they
  looking for? What do they do with the information
  you give them?
• Dee Dee Gordon I think they're looking to us
  to be kind of the eyes and ears of youth culture.
  It's a difficult job. You can't understand a
  whole culture by checking in every now and then
  or a phone here or an article there. So they kind
  of rely on us as a resource to say, "This is
  what's going on" all the time, to give them kind
  of a pulse.
• ...For instance, we have some clients who are
  interested in taking a product that already
  exists and finding a way that it can appeal to
  young people. So they will use our information to
  find out if that product is even interesting to
  them or if there's a way that they could make it
  more interesting. Same thing with advertising.
  They like to test whether or not their
  advertising is relevant to these kids or what
  kind of advertising is relevant, so that they can
  do something similar. Or let's say they want to
  like create a whole new brand or a whole new
  product with a company that targets a specific
  audience. They take out information to assist in
  inspiring project designers, in helping them
  market the new product, even in naming the
  product, and then eventually testing. They use
  our database to recruit kids to test the products
  out, stuff like that.
• http//www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool
  /etc/hunting.html

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• ...How does a trend spread?
• SharonLee ...Actually it's a triangle. At the
  top of the triangle there's the innovator, which
  is like two to three percent of the population.
  Underneath them is the trend-setter, which we
  would say is about 17 percent. And what they do
  is they pick up on ideas that the innovators are
  doing and they kind of claim them as their own.
  Underneath them is an early adopter, which is
  questionable exactly what their percentage is,
  but they kind of are the layer above mainstream,
  which is about 80 percent. And what they do is
  they take what the trend-setter is doing and they
  make it palatable for mass consumption. They take
  it, they tweak it, they make it more acceptable,
  and that's when the mass consumer picks up on it
  and runs with it and then it actually kills it.
• http//www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool
  /etc/hunting.html