Friday, Sep 5, 2008
An unholy alliance of psychologists and advertisers targets kiddie consumers.
Feb 28, 2000 | A 7-year-old boy and his mother sit at play behind a two-way mirror, research subjects scrutinized by an ad team seeking ways to sell a new breakfast cereal.
An interviewer probes the child's feelings about some established brands, eliciting heartfelt opinions about Froot Loops and Cap'n Crunch. After a while the boy begins to tire, though, and when he's asked about a particular brand, he turns to his mother and asks, "Do I like that one, Mom?"
For a parent, this vignette is oddly touching. It captures a truth about little ones: For all children's mulish intensity, their wants and plans are innocently evanescent; all that's real is the fiendish attachment to mother.
But for Langebourne Rust, who cons the soul of the family on behalf of corporations that want to sell more stuff to kids, this moment of childish confusion yields an insight that can be spun into gold.
The 7-year-old "couldn't remember, but he trusted his mom's judgment," concluded Rust, the marketing consultant at the controls on the other side of the mirror. "In the real world, lots of kids don't know what they want and look eagerly to Mom to direct them."
Rust, who has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Columbia University, has been delivering emotional intelligence to corporate clients for 28 years. His craft is to convert knowledge of kids and their families into messages that sell. And it is Rust, and professionals like him, whom a group of activists have in mind as they lobby the American Psychological Association to discipline those of its 159,000 members who "use psychological techniques to assist corporate marketing and advertising to children." (The activists, most of them psychologists who belong to the APA, formally petitioned the association with their demands in October.)
Marketing aimed at children has reached "epidemic levels," their letter stated. It is an "enormous onslaught" that constitutes "arguably the largest single psychological project ever undertaken." Psychologists who lend their services to this business, it went on, "are not using their knowledge to mitigate the causes of human suffering. They are using it instead to promote and assist the commercial exploitation and manipulation of children."
Two groups of psychologists have been targeted by the campaign. One includes child psychologists like Rust, who work in corporate advertising or as consultants. The other includes the 700 members of the Society for Consumer Psychology, who do academic research that the critics charge is too frequently aimed at improving marketing techniques rather than examining their deleterious effects.
The petition for these new ethical standards will be discussed by an APA committee next month. No short-term action on it is expected. More than anything else, it's a sign of the worried times.
The use of psychologists and their insights in advertising is hardly new. After being booted out of Johns Hopkins University in 1920 for dating a graduate student, the behaviorist John B. Watson wedded psychology and advertising at the Chicago ad firm J. Walter Thompson.
A tradition of relinquishing one's moral convictions at the agency door evidently began with Watson, whose academic work stressed that humans should gain mastery over their emotions. Watson told mothers, for example, to refrain from picking up crying babies or hugging their toddlers to encourage the formation of coolly autonomous beings.
At JWT, though, Watson championed the use of advertising as a medium that played to emotions rather than rational thought. It was as if, after observing the incorrigible wimpiness of humans, he simply threw up his hands and decided to cash in on it. "Theoretically, I had been studying this animal [people] all my days," Watson said of life before his career change. "Practically, I didn't know how to get at him."
Over the years it grew harder for advertisers to "get at" us; American adults quickly became jaded about the persuasive techniques of advertising. But studies in the 1970s revealed that young kids weren't really able to distinguish the puffery of commercials from the programming they interrupted.
Motivated by these findings, Michael Pertschuk, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, tried in 1978 to restrict TV advertising aimed at children under 13. A ferocious lobbying campaign killed his proposal, though, and the industry of stimulating childish wants began to expand.
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