Are there antidotes to advertising that targets the young?

By: Stephen Leahy

  Last Christmas morning Gary, a kid I know, got several, big elaborate presents worth several hundred dollars. He efficiently ripped through the colourful packaging one by one mumbling "thank you". With the unwrapping done, he got to the real work: consuming. By Christmas evening he'd played the new Nintendo game, broken the Star Wars Light Sabre, built a four-foot Lego spaceship, done the Science of Magnets experiment and more. Now he was bored and wanted to watch a video.
  Gary, at age 12, is an ideal consumer - happy only when he gets more and more new stuff.
 

Courtesy of the Media Awareness Network

  He didn't get that way by chance. It took an investment of $250 billion a year by advertisers and a media barrage, primarily through TV, to turn a little boy into a consumer. A recent study reported that Canadian kids watch an average of 23 hours of TV a week with commercials capturing 10 of those hours. In the US, a study on media use by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that kids aged 8 to 13 spent over six hours each day plugged in to TV, video games, CD players, radios and computers.
  By age 20 they'll have seen and heard more than 600,000 commercials that powerfully convey an agenda of values and concepts of a consumerist culture: Happiness, fulfillment and control over your life are all found at the GAP Kids store, Toys 'R' Us, and your local Ford dealer.
 

Around the world, kids age 7 to 12 already spend over $12 billion annually - 26% of that on snacks and beverages

  Over the past decade, advertisers and manufacturers have painted a big bullseye on the forehead of every kid age two and up (the age at which brand recognition begins to kicks in). Manufacturers of toys, clothes, tobacco and even alcohol and car companies are targeting children because they influence the spending of their parents to the tune of $500 billion, according to one US estimate. The Global Kids study conducted by Just Kid Inc. revealed that, around the world, kids age 7 to 12 already spend over $12 billion annually - 26% of that on snacks and beverages.
  Equally important, they're tomorrow's big spenders.
  Companies pay child psychologists big bucks to conduct research on how to influence children. A book titled What Kids Buy and Why: The Psychology of Marketing to Kids, advises use of animals in advertising because 80% of the dreams of kids to age six involve animals. The book professes to use "the latest child development research" to reveal the "cognitive, emotional, and social needs of each age group" for the express purpose of selling them stuff. This is just one of a tidal wave of recent books, newsletters and consultants that peel open children's psyches to find ways to create perfect consumers.
  Alarmed at this trend, the American Academy of Pediatrics has declared that "advertising directed toward children is inherently deceptive and exploits children under 8 years of age".
  But it's just marketing harmless toys, right?
  Consider the tobacco industry's $8 billion a year research and marketing efforts, mostly directed at getting kids to smoke. Tobacco company documents uncovered by lawsuits in the US provide ample proof of cynical campaigns to get kids smoking by the time they're 18 because hardly anyone starts smoking in their mid-20s or later. Teens and pre-teens are targeted by exploiting their normal desires to be independent from parents, and to express their independence by smoking.
 

Health Canada faces a barrage of litigation from tobacco companies whenever it tries to keep people from smoking by increasing tobacco taxes or educating smokers about the health risks on the packaging

  And it works. Smoking by teens is up dramatically, with about 30% of Canadian teens smoking. All those largely ineffective "educational" campaigns haven't had the marketing savvy nor financial clout to match the industry's. "It's going to take large-scale, long-term efforts" says Rob Cunningham of the Canadian Cancer Society and author of the book Smoke and Mirrors. Those efforts, Cunningham says, must include enforcement of laws regarding sales to minors, graphic warnings on packages and much higher prices - Ontario and Quebec have the cheapest smokes in North America.
  While Health Canada calls smoking "the single biggest public health issue in Canada", it faces a barrage of litigation from tobacco companies whenever it tries to keep people from smoking by increasing tobacco taxes or educating smokers about the health risks on the packaging.
  There is more going on than the fact that commercials for all types of products are cleverly crafted to appeal to children. Often shows, like Saturday morning cartoons or increasingly, movies with brand-name products in every scene, are just advertising wrapped around lame storylines. As for the rest of prime-time, it's hard to find 30 minutes in a TV week that doesn't celebrate the values of a consumerist culture, even when offering up some stone-simple moralization as an ending.
  So what's a parent to do?

• Teach your children principles like honesty, human dignity, integrity and fairness. A set of strong, enduring principles will be their lighthouse in the overwhelming sea of ads trying to drown them in stuff they don't need and won't ever make them happy.
• Build self esteem. Kids who are self-reliant are less likely to manipulated by advertisers who gleefully and successfully exploit our insecurities.
• Help your kids be media savvy. Kids need to understand that TV is not a window to the real world. Help them analyze how advertisers get people to buy things.
• Turn off the TV. This is a lot easier if kids, and their parents, have interesting things to do. Be creative and do stuff with your kids.

Do you have any ideas about how to counter the onslaught of advertising aimed at your children?
Straight Goods wants to know