Extra Credit:

In the section of the video Consuming Kids entitled “Brand New World,” Allen Kanner states: “The commercialization of childhood is permeating their lives. We are talking about a profound remaking of their psyche.”  Explain what is meant by this statement and the evidence given to support this conclusion.

 

 

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Consuming Kids

The Commercialization of Childhood

Transcript

INTRODUCTION

The consumer embryo begins to develop during the first year of existence. Children begin

their consumer journey in infancy. And they certainly deserve consideration as consumers

at that time.

– James U. McNeal | Pioneering Youth Marketer

[TITLE SCREEN] Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood

NARRATOR: Not since the end of World War II, at the height of the baby boom, have there

been so many kids in our midst. There are now more than 52 million kids under 12 in all in

the United States – the biggest burst in the U.S. youth population in half a century. And

for American business, these kids have come to represent the ultimate prize: an

unprecedented, powerful and elusive new demographic to be cut up and captured at all

costs. There is no doubt that marketers have their sights on kids because of their

increasing buying power – the amount of money they now spend on everything from

clothes to music to electronics, totaling some 40 billion dollars every year. But perhaps the

bigger reason for marketers’ interest in kids may be the amount of adult spending that

American kids under 12 now directly influence – an astronomical 700 billion dollars a year,

roughly the equivalent of the combined economies of the world’s 115 poorest countries.

DAVID WALSH: One economic impact of children is the money that they themselves spend

– the money that they get from their parents or grandparents, the money that they get as

allowance; when they get older, the money that they earn themselves. That is an

increasingly significant amount of money, but that’s not where the real money is.

Marketers and advertisers have realized that the real money related to the children’s

market is in their purchasing influence.

MINI-VAN AD:

Girl: Any questions? Jared.

Jared: Does it do any tricks?

Girl: (opens doors using remote) Does that work for you?

DAVID WALSH: Because of their purchasing power, and because of their purchasing

influence, marketers and advertisers have become much more deliberate in their strategies

and attempts to how to influence those dollars.

MINI-VAN AD (cont’d):

Ad Narrator: Sienna. Because kids come first.

BETSY TAYLOR: It’s the children who often determine what kind of car gets bought, what

kind of computer gets bought, what kind of cell phone program, and even where they

take family holidays.

NICKELODEON HOTEL AD:

Ad Narrator: What’s your favorite part of the Nick Hotel?

Kids: The awesome pools. Having my own room. The arcade rocks. I like to shop. I like

eating with SpongeBob.

Parents: We came on vacation, and the kids don’t ever want to leave.

GARY RUSKIN: Most parents, and other people, just don’t realize how corporate marketers

intentionally try to – well, in essence – make parents absolutely miserable.

(Child throwing tantrum in store)

GARY RUSKIN: Corporate marketers have actually studied the whole nagging

phenomenon – which corporations do nagging better – and they provide advice to

corporations about what kinds of tantrums work better.

ENOLA AIRD: Children sometimes say, “Can I? Can I? Can I?” as much as nine times.

‘THE SIMPSONS’ TV SHOW:

Bart & Lisa: Will you take us to Mount Splashmore?

Homer: No!

ENOLA AIRD: And part of the Nag Factor is designed to help maximize the number of

times children will keep asking and keep asking.

‘THE SIMPSONS’ TV SHOW (cont’d):

Bart & Lisa: Will you take us to Mount Splashmore?

Homer: No!

Bart & Lisa: Will you take us to Mount Splashmore?

Homer: If I take you to Mount Splashmore, will you two shut up and quit bugging me?

Bart & Lisa: Yeah, of course. Well, will you take us to Mount Splashmore?

Homer: Yes!

Bart & Lisa: Thanks, Dad!

BETSY TAYLOR: So these kids have a lot of power in the economy. The advertisers know it,

and they are going after them in a way that is unprecedented.

BP GASOLINE AD:

Singing: It’s the place where I want to be. I say, hey!

Text on Screen: Gas stations. A little better, baby.

SUSAN LINN: This generation of children is marketed to as never before. Kids are being

marketed to through brand licensing, through product placement, marketing in schools,

through stealth marketing, through viral marketing. There’s DVDs, there’s video games,

there’s the internet, there are iPods, there are cell phones. There are so many more ways of

reaching children so that there is a brand in front of a child’s face every moment of every

day.

NICK RUSSELL: What we have is the rise of 360 degree immersive marketing, where they try

and get around the child at every aspect and every avenue.

MICHAEL BRODY: Kids are inundated with this. They are buried in this – buried in this

media blitz.

MICHAEL RICH: Kids are now multitasking with media.

BARBIE DOLL AD:

Barbie: (on cell phone) Hello. Hey Girl! What’s up? No Way!

Ad Narrator: Plug in your iPod or mp3 player.

Barbie: Yeah! New music!

MICHAEL RICH: They are using more than one medium at the same time. So they’re surfing

the web, and the television’s going with MTV, and they’ve got the iPod with one ear bud

in, and they are more vulnerable and are bombarded with over 3,000 commercial

messages every day.

BETSY TAYLOR: Marketers know these are little sponges. They’re so wide open. They want

to get that brand loyalty for life because that’s big bucks.

ENOLA AIRD: It’s about people wanting to convince our children that life is about buying,

life is about getting.

PORSCHE AD:

Salesman: Can I help you?

Boy: Yeah, I’m here to see this.

Salesman: Go ahead.

ENOLA AIRD: So the philosophy becomes cradle to grave: Let’s get to them early. Let’s get

to them often. Let’s get to them as many places as we can get them.

PORSCHE AD (cont’d):

Boy: Do you have a business card?

Salesman: Sure.

ENOLA AIRD: Not just to sell them products and services, but to turn them into life-long

consumers.

PORSCHE AD (cont’d):

Boy: I’ll see you in about 20 years.

THE FLOODGATES OPEN

ADVERTISING INDUSTRY FILM (1942): Though grown-ups represent the greater part of any

community’s purchasing power, children very definitely are an influence in the purchasing

of everyday commodities.

JULIET SCHOR: Children have participated for a very long time in the consumer

marketplace, but in the past, children’s consumer culture was a cheap little culture.

CBS NEWS (1971): Every afternoon, the kids make a beeline for the Seminole 5 and 10, a

terribly misnamed candy store. It should be called the Seminole 1 and 2 because that’s the

way Alice and Frank Smith make their living – a penny at a time.

JULIET SCHOR: Well, it’s penny candy because kids only had pennies.

(Montage of B&W Advertisements)

JULIET SCHOR: Although it’s true there was advertising to children back in the 1950s, the

1960s, even in the 70s, the amount of it was very confined in comparison to today.

NARRATOR: Advertising to kids may have been confined during the 70s, but it was during

this period that it would come into its own as an industry, triggering a counter-movement

to end youth marketing all together; and setting in motion a series of policy decisions

that would ultimately determine the industry’s future.

JOSH GOLIN: A seminal event was in the late 70s when the Federal Trade Commission

advocated a ban on advertising to children eight and under.

NEWS: The Federal Trade Commission staff believes that children are deceived by

television advertising, particularly commercials for cereal with sugar in it, and it wants to

stop all advertising aimed at young children.

JOSH GOLIN: This ban was based, in part, on concern about sugared cereals and cavities,

and also based on research that indicated that children eight and under did not

understand the persuasive intent of advertising.

FTC PUBLIC HEARINGS (March 5, 1979):

Boardman: Are you saying that every message directed to the older child – a child

between eight and 12 – is inherently deceptive?

Peggy Charren: That’s right. I think the child cannot bring enough information to bear not

to be deceived and to have an unfair trade practice.

JOSH GOLIN: So what ended up happening was the industries that were going to be

affected – the toy industries, the sugar cereal companies – went to Congress.

FRED FURTH (Kellogg Lawyer): In an American democratic capitalistic society, we almost

learn, top to bottom, to care for ourselves, and what the last thing we need the next 20

years is a national nanny.

JOSH GOLIN: And Congress ended up taking away a lot of the FTC’s authority to regulate

marketing to children.

NARRATOR: Far from addressing consumer advocates’ concerns about the impact of

advertising on kids, in 1980, Congress passed the FTC Improvement Act. The law mandated

that the FTC would no longer have any authority to promulgate any rules regarding

children’s advertising.

ENOLA AIRD: The Congress of the United States, under pressure from advertisers and

marketers, actually robbed – took away from the FTC – the right, the authority to regulate

advertising and marketing to children.

NARRATOR: And what little remained of government’s power to regulate children’s

advertising would be dealt a final, fatal blow in the early 1980s.

RONALD REAGAN: Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the

problem.

SUSAN LINN: In the 1980s, this country was in a situation of falling in love with the market,

thinking that the market was the solution to everything, and of deregulating industry.

RONALD REAGAN: For those of you with television stations, I have an announcement. As

you know, I’ve never liked big government. And I think you’d agree that there’s no reason

to substitute the judgment of Washington bureaucrats for that of professional

broadcasters.

NARRATOR: By 1984, the Reagan administration had completely deregulated children’s

television. All bets were now off.

JOSH GOLIN: Corporations now realized that Congress was not going to do anything to

restrict their power to marketing to children, and they now actually had more power.

ENOLA AIRD: And low and behold, a lot of really smart marketers discovered children as a

huge market.

NARRATOR: In the two decades prior to deregulation, kid’s consumer spending increased

at a modest rate of roughly 4% a year. Since deregulation, it has grown a remarkable 35%

every year, from 4.2 billion dollars in 1984 to 40 billion dollars today – an 852% increase.

NANCY CARLSSON-PAIGE: Deregulation really opened the floodgates for a kind of

marketing to children that never existed before the mid-1980s.

(‘He-Man’ program intro)

SUSAN LINN: Suddenly it became okay to create a television program for the sole purpose

of selling a toy.

HE-MAN TOY AD:

Boy #1: No one can stop the spike-studded armor of the mighty Spikeor.

Boy #2: (holding He-Man action figure) Not even me?

Boy #1: Not even you, He-Man!

NARRATOR: And sure enough, in the year immediately following the Congressional

action, the ten best selling toys were all based on kid’s television shows. It was the

beginning of a new era for childhood marketing.

DIANE LEVIN: A few years after deregulation, when the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’

movie came out, there were over a thousand products linked to the movie. There was also

the TV show children were seeing every day, and there was the comic book that slightly

older children started to look at. It was a saturation of the whole childhood culture.

MICHAEL BRODY: When I was a kid, ‘Hopalong Cassidy’ was on television. It was like one

of the first children’s programming. It was only after he became so successful that they

developed the lunch box. Now they develop the lunch box and the dolls before.

(‘Star Wars’ toy light saber ad)

MICHAEL BRODY: This is why people like George Lucas have said, “I am not a film director.

I am a toymaker.”

ABC NEWS: Everything ‘Star Wars.’ Chewbacca is recording ring tones for a cell phone

company. ‘Star Wars,’ the marketing force, has married its name to a pile of products –

including masks, dolls, light sabers, hats, snacks, cups, more snacks, wind up toys, action

figures, cereal and even a best selling book.

NARRATOR: And so, with deregulation, a new world had been opened to marketers – free

now to turn the most powerful emotional attachments of kids into unheard-of profits.

BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

SUSAN LINN: Their goal is to insinuate their brands into the fabric of children’s lives.

GARY RUSKIN: So many children’s characters’ principle function is really to hook kids on

products. They’re designed to pull on kids’ heartstrings.

BIKE AD: It’s your chance to make the Little Mermaid ‘part of your world.’

GARY RUSKIN: And then who’s holding the strings? Well, it’s the marketers who want to

sell kids a wide variety of products.

DIANE LEVIN: So you end up having junk food promotions at fast food restaurants,

breakfast cereals with images of the main characters from the movies. You have bed

sheets so that children literally go to bed thinking about the images. Then they go to

school with their backpacks and their lunchboxes with the logos. Then they get to school

and their friends have on the t-shirts and the shoes, and they want them.

FATHER WITH DAUGHTERS IN FOOD STORE:

Daughter: How about Scooby-Doo crackers?

Father: Scooby-Doo? Do you like those?

Daughter: Yeah.

Father: Have you ever had them?

Daughter: No.

Father: How do you know you like them?

Daughter: Because I love them so so so much!

SUSAN LINN: SpongeBob SquarePants was Kraft’s best selling macaroni & cheese. I

personally know a five year old who told her father, in no uncertain terms, that

SpongeBob SquarePants Macaroni & Cheese tastes better than any other macaroni &

cheese. Now, how do you argue with a 5 year old about that? What do you say? You say,

‘no it doesn’t,’ and then she says, ‘yeah it does.’ ‘But no, really it doesn’t.’ ‘No, it does. I

know it does.’ ‘Well, have you ever had SpongeBob SquarePants Macaroni & Cheese?’ ‘No,

but I know that it tastes better.’

MICHAEL RICH: Growing up is a very strenuous, difficult, and sometimes hard and scary

process for children. One of the things that gives them some stability and continuity in

that is their attachment to touchstones in their lives. And among those touchstones are

characters: Clifford the big red dog, Mickey Mouse. These are constants in their lives. These

are things that they have figured out, they feel they understand, and that they feel

comfortable with, and indeed, in their own way, love. When you take that, and you

leverage that into saying, ‘eat this food,’ you are basically leveraging that very powerful

emotion that the child has – that very powerful attachment – to make money.

MCDONALD’S AD: To celebrate Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media’s presentation of

‘The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,’ you can get a pop-up

storybook and an out-of-this-world action figure in every McDonald’s Happy Meal.

NARRATOR: But marketers have not limited themselves to dropping the names of

beloved characters to sell their products. With increasing brazenness, they have also

begun to drop the products, themselves, directly into kids’ entertainment.

‘LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION’ FILM CLIP:

Brendan Fraser: Hey, look at that!

Angelic Voices: Wal-Mart!

Bugs Bunny: Is it a mirage or just product placement?

Daffy Duck: Hey, who cares with shopping convenience at such low prices? Water! Fresca!

Mountain Dew! Your product name here!

GARY RUSKIN: Product placement is weaving of products into programming without

adequate disclosure.

‘ZOOM’ FILM CLIP:

Wendy’s Employee: Welcome to Wendy’s. May I take your order, please?

Father: (screaming over children) Classic triple with lettuce and tomato.

Wendy’s Employee: Classic?

Father: (still screaming over children) What kind of toys do you have?

GARY RUSKIN: And so it’s dishonest advertising. It’s deceptive advertising. It sneaks by

children’s critical faculties and plants its messages in kids’ brains when they’re paying less

attention.

SUSAN LINN: ‘American Idol,’ which is a top-rated television program for 2 to 11 year olds,

is just rife with Coca-Cola product placement.

‘AMERICAN IDOL’ TV SHOW: ‘American Idol’ is brought to you by Coca-Cola.

SUSAN LINN: The Gilmore girls eat Pop Tarts for breakfast.

‘GILMORE GIRLS’ TV SHOW:

Daughter: Are you enjoying your breakfast?

Mother: I don’t know if I like Pop Tarts.

Daughter: Did you fall on your head while you were sleeping?

Mother: I don’t know. Do I like this? Is this something I like?

SUSAN LINN: Children’s films have product placement in them. ‘Spy Kids’ had McDonald’s

as a plot point.

(‘Spy Kids’ movie clip featuring McDonalds food)

SUSAN LINN: And also, product placement is getting more and more prevalent in video

games.

(Wal-Mart racing car in ‘Burnout Paradise’)

NARRATOR: And when ads haven’t been serving as a backdrop in video games, they have

become the video game.

CBS NEWS: With children now as likely to be on the internet as in the playground, they’re

exposed to so much advertising they learn to ignore it. That’s why advertisers love

internet games. Not just ads, not just games, they’re advergames. She can score with

Skittles, race with Chips Ahoy, or hang out with SpongeBob.

ENOLA AIRD: It’s part of this – by any means necessary – we’ve got to get to the kid. We’ve

got to make sure that this kid is indoctrinated as a consumer cadet, so therefore we have

to get to them in ways that they maybe don’t even know that we’re getting to them.

NARRATOR: This new world of advertising in entertainment, and entertainment as

advertising, no longer seems to recognize any boundaries – especially with the rise of new

media technologies.

THE EARLY SHOW: Children with cell phones have become a prime target for marketers

selling products. It’s because 1 in 4 American kids between the ages of 8 and 12 has a cell

phone. That’s five million children, and that number is expected to double in the next

three years.

GARY RUSKIN: Cell phones make children much more vulnerable to advertising. It’s

advertising literally right in the face of a child.

DISNEY MOBILE AD: I can get all kinds of themes, ring tones and lots of cool games, like

‘Pirates of the Caribbean.’

SUSAN LINN: Disney and Nickelodeon now have downloadable content for cell phones.

DISNEY MOBILE AD: Watch videos, catch cast interviews, interact with a favorite Wildcat.

SUSAN LINN: Companies are using text messaging in order to reach kids. I mean if your

child has a cell phone and that cell phone has internet access, then your kid is being

marketed to, you know, in ways that you don’t even know. So we have to stop thinking of

marketing to children as just commercials. I mean commercials are so twentieth century.

NICKTROPOLIS AD: Introducing Nicktropolis! A huge new world just waiting to be

explored – by you!

NARRATOR: With more than 40 million kids online daily and growing, perhaps no tool has

become more important to marketers than the internet. And advertisers are making sure

to hit kids where they gather, where tens of millions of elementary age kids are coming

together to chat, play games, and watch videos – all while being immersed in the brand.

(Webkinz welcome screen)

NARRATOR: At Webkinz, for example, millions of kids a day chat with each other, explore,

and shop in a virtual world. A world open only to those who go to a designated store and

buy a $15 stuffed animal imprinted with a secret code that allows kids to join and enter

the Webkinz world, where they are encouraged to shop some more. One of the reasons

marketers covet these sites is because of their proven ability to gather personal

information from kids.

MICHAEL BRODY: The internet allows people to be micro-targeted. If you have the

person’s birthday, you can say, ‘Happy birthday, Billy! Have you seen the new Power

Ranger watch?’ It’s very personal.

NICK RUSSELL: If you set up five different accounts, from five different geographic areas,

on different genders, on different ages and different preferences, you will see five

different ads. You will see five different worlds. Now, as a child, you don’t know that. As a

child, you’re competing with MBAs. You’re competing with some of the smartest people

out there.

NARRATOR: In the face of these developments, many critics of youth marketing have

called on schools to develop media literacy curricula to help kids navigate commercial

culture. The results have sometimes been less than encouraging.

FOX NEWS: ‘And now a word from our sponsor.’ That’s how some schools are making extra

money, literally selling themselves to advertisers. Everything from the band shell to the

lecture hall can be named for a price at New Berlin Schools.

JOSH GOLIN: There’s advertising on school walls, on school buses, and gymnasiums.

There’s donated scoreboards that have the Coca-Cola or the Pepsi logo on them.

GARY RUSKIN: There are so many ways that commercialism has intruded into our

classrooms. There’s Coke and Pepsi and Cadbury Schweppes in the schools, which are

helping to generate an epidemic of childhood obesity among our kids across the country.

There’s schoolbook covers. There are sponsored educational materials. There’s a company

called Field Trip Factory, which takes kids to places like Petco and to Sports Authority and

calls that education.

CBS NEWS:

Reporter: The Chicago kindergarteners are on a school field trip, but the animals they are

going to see aren’t in the zoo.

Store Employee: We want to welcome you to Petco.

Reporter: Across the country, a growing number of schools are taking America’s

classrooms to America’s malls.

GARY RUSKIN: There’s a new company called Bus Radio, which is trying to compel a million

kids to listen to 8 minutes of advertisements per hour as they ride the school bus.

BUS RADIO PROMO: Bus Radio! BusRadio.com. We’ll choose a name at random, and if

you’re the winner, we’ll give a pair of tickets to your bus driver too. You guys can hang out

together, maybe share a large Coke. Email us as soon as you get home.

GARY RUSKIN: There’s Channel One, which compels about 7 million children to watch ads

in schools each school day.

(Channel 1 television screen)

GARY RUSKIN: The purpose of schools, in part, is to promote reason. And the purpose of

advertising is to subvert reason, to promote the sale of a product, and for that reason

alone, advertising has no proper place in the schools.

DAVID WALSH: How often does a company realize that they are going to get a captive

audience, where people literally have to watch their message? The effort to create junior

consumers no longer stops at the school door. It is now following kids into school.

NARRATOR: But if it’s been following kids into schools, it’s also been coming out of our

schools – in the form of advanced academic research, producing a new class of child

marketing experts armed with some of the most formidable scientific tools.

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

ENOLA AIRD: Psychologists and anthropologists and sociologists and behavioral scientists

are used by marketers to really shape and cement children’s brand preferences. They want

to be part of the fabric of children’s lives.

DAN ACUFF: Twelve years ago, there were no youth conferences where you looked at

more effective ways to market to kids. Now there are probably 15 a year – different

conferences on tweens, teenagers, the Latino community, how to reach youth with your

product, your program, your packages, your characters, your advertising campaign, how to

reach them more effectively, how to get more of their dollars – which is marketing, and

you can’t blame people for that. But is it balanced with more conversations, more

discussions of what’s good for kids? How we can move our society forward in a healthier

way? No.

GARY RUSKIN: Child psychologists and other psychologists are now absolutely integrated

within the marketing field. Their techniques are so widespread that, in fact, it’s probably

pretty hard to come up with parts of the marketing effort that don’t have anything to do

with psychology.

ALLEN KANNER: You’re a psychologist. You do research. You know the difference between

a three year old and a five year old, and you know how to reach a three year old, and you

know that you have to play the ad much more slowly and use round figures instead of

angles, because children like round figures at that age. And you know that five year olds

have a whole different set of concerns, so we can fine-tune the marketing to communicate

better with children.

NARRATOR: One means of fine-tuning is the tried and true method of the focus group.

NICK RUSSELL: It’s quiet. It’s controlled. There’s usually a one-way mirror so we can see

behavioral cues. It’s how they look. It’s the look in their eyes. Especially with kids who

don’t have that sense yet of self-monitoring. You know, all their actions are very

descriptive, and once we take what they say, and then feed that into how they look when

they say it, and their behavioral cues, we really end up with a strong measurement of how

a product effects them.

NARRATOR: Still another means is ethnographic research, which, tuned to the goals of

marketers, has become a kind of scientific stalking.

JULIET SCHOR: They go into supermarkets with them and film exactly how they look at a

product, pick it up, put it back down, the way they move around the supermarket. They

film them on the playground. They film them in school. They film them eating breakfast.

They film them going into their closet and deciding what to wear.

YOUTH MARKETER: What are the things that you need?

JULIET SCHOR: They film them talking to their friends. They organize little friendship

circles and film what they’re doing. They even follow them into the bathroom. I

interviewed a number of people who sat and watched children take baths and showers,

watched how they interact with shampoo and soap and health and beauty products as

that category is called, in order to go back and write a report for their clients on what to

do with the packaging. It’s creepy. It’s just absolutely creepy the way children are being

dissected and put under the microscope by marketers.

NARRATOR: This is new consumer science, and it’s yielding a new science of childhood.

And perhaps nowhere else have the different elements of this science merge so

seamlessly as in the Girls Intelligence Agency.

‘60 MINUTES’:

Reporter: Not the CIA. It’s the Girls Intelligence Agency, which for all the cloak and dagger,

is actually a marketing firm.

JULIET SCHOR: The Girls Intelligence Agency claims to have tens, if not hundreds, of

thousands of girls across the country that it is in contact with and working with. The

signature product of the GIA is something called the Slumber Party in a Box. Kids are

asked to sort of push a certain product, or they’re more like focus group parties where

kids are asked to come and give their opinions on products.

‘60 MINUTES’ (cont’d):

GIA Secret Agent: What is the hottest item: the sleep mask, the fuzzy phone, or the beauty

kits? The fuzzy phone!

JULIET SCHOR: They ask them to be sly. They ask them to get information on their friends

without their friends knowing about it. It’s teaching children to exploit their friends for

the purpose of getting money or free products.

‘60 MINUTES’ (cont’d):

Reporter: What happened at your home the other day: marketing or was it a party?

GIA Secret Agent: It was kinda both. It was a party for us, but it was marketing for the

companies.

Reporter: And is that cool with you?

GIA Secret Agent: Definitely!

JULIET SCHOR: One of the more problematic aspects of its behavior is that it will enlist

young children in its marketing efforts without their parents knowing about it.

ROBERT REIHER: There’s a lot that’s happening around us, and the public is not aware –

just like they’re not aware of neuro-marketing. That’s another whole new scary thing to

put a child on a MRI, and watch what is being lit up inside his brain based on the stimulus,

and then saying, ‘wow, this works, this is good, look what happens.’

JULIET SCHOR: They do blink tests on kids, for example. They develop ads, and then see

how frequently a kid blinks or turns their eyes away. And when they see the kid blinking

more, they change the ad to make it more mesmerizing. There’s stuff they just can’t take

their eyes off, and it’s not an accident. They’ve gone over and over and over with

extensive high-tech kinds of testing devices to find the precise configuration of

characters, colors, music, words and so forth that kids can’t resist.

ENOLA AIRD: They want to spend time understanding child development, understanding

the child’s need to belong, a child’s need for community, a child’s need for independence

to encourage children to buy.

LUCY HUGHES (from ‘The Corporation’): And somebody asked me: ‘Lucy, is that ethical?

You’re essentially manipulating these children.’ Well, is it ethical? I don’t know. But our role

at Initiative is to move products, and if we know you move products with a certain

creative execution, placed in a certain type of media vehicle, then we’ve done our job.

They are tomorrow’s consumer – tomorrow’s adult consumer – so start talking with them

now, build that relationship when they’re younger, and you’ve got them as an adult.

MICHAEL BRODY: I’ll say it. These marketers are very similar to pedophiles. Okay? They are

child experts. If you’re going to be a pedophile, or a child marketer, you have to know

about children and what children are going to want.

YOUTH MARKETER (from ‘Affluenza’): Kids love advertising. It’s a gift. It’s something they

want. There’s something to be said, by the way, about being there first and about

branding children and owning them in that way. An antisocial behavior in pursuit of a

product is a good thing.

BRAND NEW WORLD

JULIET SCHOR: Companies have moved away from exaggerating the product

characteristics…

BLAZE HORSE AD: See! His legs actually move just like a real horse. Blaze is the safest,

strongest horse made.

JULIET SCHOR: To a whole new form of advertising, which is symbolic advertising.

(McDonald’s advertisement featuring hip-hop music)

JULIET SCHOR: The product is pushed not on the basis of what it can do, or how it tastes,

but of its social meaning.

SNEAKERS AD: Run cool. Play cool. Be cool.

JULIET SCHOR: So kids are taught to want candy, or sugared cereals, or soda because it’s

cool.

(Cheetoh’s advertisement featuring hip-hop music)

JULIET SCHOR: It will define them as an individual. What you buy is who you are.

(‘The Coke Side of Life’ advertisement)

VELMA LAPOINT: There’s a mantra in American society: “You are what you have. You are

what you buy. You are what you own.”

‘HANNAH MONTANA’ TV SHOW:

Girl #1: Where did she find that outfit? Like Ugly-R-Us?

Girl #2: More like Ugly-R-Her.

Girl #3: We are so funny.

Girl #1: And pretty.

Girl #2: I love us.

VELMA LAPOINT: The corollary of that is: “And if you don’t have it, then you are less than.

You’re a nobody. You don’t have self-esteem.” And this happens even for children.

‘UNACCOMPANIED MINORS’ FILM CLIP:

Kid #1: Nice Jacket. Abercrombie?

Kid #2: Please – it’s Dior. Why? Is yours from A&F?

Kid #3: Our mom bought it for him at K-Mart.

SUSAN LINN: I think the thing that upsets me the most is that it’s not just products that are

being marketed to children, but values. And the primary value that’s being sold to kids

over and over and over again is the value that things or stuff or brands will make us

happy.

JULIET SCHOR: The costs of participating in the consumer culture for children have

escalated dramatically.

MY FIRST SONY AD: (singing) I like the bike. I like the pony. But what I love is My First Sony.

JULIET SCHOR: Fifteen years ago, the My First Sony, which would be, you know, a kid’s

version of a tape recorder, or a music player, would cost far less than the adult version. But

today, it’s an iPod…

(iPod advertisement)

JULIET SCHOR: In grades one, two, three, four even. Very, very expensive products.

(Fashion show with young girls in designer clothes)

JULIET SCHOR: We’re seeing elementary school girls – six, seven year olds – articulating

adamant preferences for designer jeans that cost a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars.

That’s part of that shift from children’s culture being a cheap culture to a very upscale

children’s culture, in which it’s not only branded, but it’s designer branded.

‘HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 2’ FILM CLIP: (singing) Fetch me my Jimmy Chu flip-flops. Where is

my pink Prada tote? I need my Tiffany hair-band. Then I can go for a float.

ENOLA AIRD: It’s got to have it, gimme. That’s the value system.

‘HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 2’ FILM CLIP (cont’d): (singing) I want more.

ENOLA AIRD: Self-indulgence, instant gratification, and materialism.

‘HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 2’ FILM CLIP (cont’d): (singing) Everything’s got to be perfect for

me.

ENOLA AIRD: That’s the basic consumer identity.

‘SUITE LIFE OF ZACK & CODY’ TV SHOW:

Music Teacher: You could try thinking of things that remind you of each note. (sings) Do.

Student: That’s easy. Dough means money.

ENOLA AIRD: It’s shallow. It’s about me.

‘SUITE LIFE OF ZACK & CODY’ TV SHOW (cont’d):

Music Teacher: (sings) Mi.

Student: Yay! Me!

ENOLA AIRD: It’s about me now, and it’s about me and these things.

‘SUITE LIFE OF ZACK & CODY’ TV SHOW (cont’d):

Music Teacher: (sings) La.

Student: Law is something you get to break if you’re rich.

ENOLA AIRD: That’s the attitude. It’s all about me.

‘BRATZ’ FILM CLIP: (singing) You know it’s all about me.

DAVID WALSH: It’s really a disservice to kids. I think part of what we need to be able to tell

kids is that it’s fine to have nice things. There’s nothing wrong to having nice things. But

don’t mistake that for happiness and satisfaction.

‘KIDS SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS’ TV SHOW:

Art Linkletter: In about twenty years, what do you want to be?

Kid #1: I want to be a baseball player.

Kid #2: A teacher.

Kid #3: I want to be a policeman.

ALLEN KANNER: When I first started seeing children as a psychotherapist about a quarter

of a century ago, I would routinely ask them what they wanted to be when they grow up,

and would hear things like a nurse, an astronaut, or some profession that seemed

glamorous to them.

‘KIDS SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS’ TV SHOW (cont’d):

Art Linkletter: By the way, what does your father do for a living?

Boy: He designs.

Art Linkletter: He designs what?

Boy: Missiles.

Art Linkletter: And what are you going to do?

Boy: I’m gonna be a postman.

Art Linkletter: And why do you want to be a postman?

Boy: There isn’t so much to it, and you can read the postcards.

ALLEN KANNER: Around the late 80s, it started to change, and I started to hear children

answer that question with the word ‘rich.’ ‘When I grow up I want to be rich. I want to

make a lot of money. I want to have a lot of stuff.’

‘HANNAH MONTANA’ TV SHOW:

Boy #1: How we doing today, twice-my-size?

Boy #2: Makin’ bacon, mini-me.

Boy #1: And we ain’t fakin’. Time to do…

Both: A little shakin’.

ALLEN KANNER: The commercialization of childhood is permeating their lives. We’re

talking about a profound remaking of their psyche.

BETSY TAYLOR: In that world of materialism, kids are not allowed to be kids anymore.

They have to grow up fast. We see it in the way they’re being asked to dress, the violence

they’re being asked to navigate. And what’s getting squeezed out is childhood.

CRADLE TO GRAVE

‘TODAY’ TV SHOW: Marketers even have a name for this trend. They call it: ‘Kids Getting

Older Younger.’

UNIDENTIFIED AD:

Woman: Where’s Carla?

Ad Narrator: Meet the go-to girl of the fashion world: you!

MICHAEL RICH: The natural developmental urge is to be older, more mature, faster. No one

who is seventeen reads Seventeen magazine. It’s the 10 and 12 and 13-year-olds who are

reading it to understand what it’s like to be seventeen. What is happening is that

marketing is taking advantage of that natural urge and selling down to lower and lower

age groups.

‘TODAY’ TV SHOW: Manicure and pedicure parties are a big hit for 5-year-olds. And why

wouldn’t girls as young as the age of 6 buy cosmetics? Experts say their role models are

not teachers, astronauts, or doctors. Instead, it’s the teen idols they’re attracted to.

NARRATOR: And nothing points to the industry infatuation with age compression more

than its invention of the tween.

NBC NEWS:

Reporter: Club Libby Lu caters to tween girls, like Shelby, celebrating her tenth birthday

with friends. And afterwards, showing mom what a tween girl wants – and that’s just what

a CEO wants.

Mary Drolet (Club Libby Lu CEO): There’s a lot of little girls out there, and they have a lot of

buying power.

NICK RUSSELL: Tween. In be-tween. In between what? I don’t know. I don’t know what’s

before tween because the bottom end of tween is constantly getting younger. It used to

be eight to twelve. And now it’s six to twelve. And it can get four to twelve.

JULIET SCHOR: And this gives you a clue to some of the perverted thinking that’s going

on in this field. The idea that a six year old is no longer a child but is between childhood

and adolescence.

NARRATOR: One of the crucial aspects of this trend is that marketers never communicate

their adult messages and values to kids simply as kids but as boys and as girls.

DIANE LEVIN: And girls are being taught they need to be pretty, sexy, and what they buy

determines their value, and how they look determines their value.

NARRATOR: It’s true that, to some extent, advertisers have always appealed to girls at this

level. But there can be little doubt that something radically different has emerged over the

past few years.

MY SCENE BARBIE AD:

(Singing) It’s My Scene: My Bling Bling Bling.

Barbie: The new My Scene: My Bling Bling Girls are here.

Girl: Nice bling!

Barbie: Here. Wear my ring.

Girl: Sparkly!

JULIET SCHOR: You see now dolls with highly sexualized outfits and themes marketed to

six year olds.

(Bratz Forever Diamondz advertisement)

DIANE LEVIN: I go to visit pre-schools, and I’ll see four-year-old girls in what I often call

‘crotch skirts,’ modeled after Bratz dolls.

BRATZ ONLINE AD:

Girl #1: That’s so cute. I would seriously wear that.

Girl #2: Be Bratz. Belong.

MICHAEL RICH: While one part of you cognitively may be able to accept belly shirts when

you’re seven years old, are you emotionally mature enough to handle the outcome when

you go out in public and people look at you, you know, like an underage Britney Spears?

NARRATOR: And with boys we see the same pattern. While to some degree, marketers

have long targeted young boys with what would seem to be adult messages – messages

that equate being a man with aggression and toughness and violence – today’s boys are

immersed in an all-together different world.

(Montage of violent images)

JULIET SCHOR: With boys what we see is the use of images of violence, power, domination

at very young ages.

DAVID WALSH: With videogames, for example, we went from 16-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit to

128-bit technology in about five years. What that means is that we’re getting closer and

closer to virtual reality.

(Montage of violent video games)

NANCY CARLSSON-PAIGE: The amount of violence, entertainment violence that young

children are exposed to is startling. They’re getting the message that when you have

conflicts, you fight with violence, that you have to fight in order to resolve your

differences, that’s what you do…

(Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toy advertisement)

NANCY CARLSSON-PAIGE: And that watching violence is fun.

(Montage of WWE violence)

NANCY CARLSSON-PAIGE: It’s entertaining.

(Young kids in WWE audience)

MICHAEL RICH: The Federal Trade Commission report that came out, looking at the

marketing of media to children, showed that indeed the media industry was marketing

material to children that even their own rating systems said were too young for that

material.

ABC NEWS: The studios confirmed to congress today that children as young as 9 years old

were tested for their reactions to R-rated violent movies.

ROBERT IGER (Walt Disney Company): Clearly there were times during the period discussed

in the FTC report when we allowed competitive zeal to overwhelm sound judgment and

appropriate standards…

MICHAEL RICH: So the very people who are making the product are telling you what’s

appropriate for kids. And there has been a shift in the space of a decade of one full ratings

point. So, what was an R-rated movie is now a PG-13. They don’t use child development

experts in deciding this, and the questions they ask are not: is this ok for kids? It is: would

parent’s let of a certain age of kids watch this?

‘MEET THE FOCKERS’ FILM CLIP: I still masturbate to Pam. Look at those boobs! Man! I just

want to lather them up with soap and just…

JULIET SCHOR: One thing that happened when the movie studios tightened up on letting

kids into R movies was that the sexual content, drug content, alcohol, tobacco, profanity,

adult content migrated into the PG-13 movies. So they’re a lot more like what R movies

used to be.

NANCY CARLSSON-PAIGE: And a Hollywood movie that’s rated for older viewers, PG-13 or

R, has a whole line of toys and products marketed to children 3, 4, and 5 years old.

ITSY BITSY SPIDER-MAN AD: The new Itsy Bitsy Spider-Man.

NARRATOR: Despite growing concerns about the industry’s explicit strategy of age

compression, its drive to reach kids at younger and younger ages has only accelerated.

The result is a massive and growing toddler industry that, almost from the womb, now

blankets babies in brands.

SUSAN LINN: It’s really hard to find baby paraphernalia that’s not plastered with media

characters. You can find unbranded baby stuff, but you can find it in high-end toy stores.

But if you go to just places where poor or middle class families shop, it’s all branded, so

the babies start out life with the notion of consumption. And that’s not an accident. What

they want is cradle to grave brand loyalty. That’s what they talk about – share of mind.

They talk about owning children for life.

PEPSI AD:

Cindy Crawford: (to baby) I love you.

Ad Narrator: Norman Pheeny. Pepsi drinker for life. (baby winks)

ENOLA AIRD: There’s been this recognition apparently that children as young as six

months of age can recognize brands, so now if they can recognize brands, we got to make

sure that they recognize our brand. The marketer is interested in getting to that child at

the very, very beginning to begin to shape that child’s worldview, to begin to shape that

child’s brand preferences, to begin to basically tell the child in a sense what that child

needs in order to have a meaningful life. And that’s where we say, as mothers: ‘that’s our

job, and it’s not theirs.’