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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
What are some of the defenses people in the children's marketing industry use to defend their work?
The most common idea is that marketers are empowering children, they're giving them information and appealing fantasies. But they're "empowering" them by saying things like, "If you buy this shoe you can jump as high as Michael Jordan!" "If you eat this cereal, you'll get amazing energy." And the fantasies are all product-focused.
Marketers like to tell us that children are incredibly savvy these days. They'll say things like, "Kids have 'truth meters' and 'lie detectors' and they know when you're trying to deceive them!" I don't think anyone will disagree that kids are more savvy about marketing than in the past, but that doesn't mean that they are able to be critical of advertising and persuasive messages in the same way adults can be.
Another defense is that parents always have the option of protecting children from advertising. They can turn off the television and just say no.
Well, can't they? Where do we draw the line between parental responsibility and societal responsibility?
I think there's no question that the responsibility lies in both camps. But the industry is saying the onus of responsibility is all on parents, which I think is a really disingenuous point of view. We've got single parents, we've got parents working longer hours than ever -- parents simply can't monitor what their kids are watching, doing, engaging with every second of the day. The truth is that the hottest areas of marketing right now are where parents don't have control, like schools, boys and girls clubs, churches, "good" television, etc.
In addition, marketers have figured out how to break down parental resistance, especially around food. Parents have a lot working against them, and it does get very hard to restrict, especially if families live in an environment where other parents are allowing this and permitting that. And what about the kids who, for whatever reason, don't have parents who protect them or watch over them? Do we, as a society, just say, "Too bad for those kids! We're certainly not going to do anything for them!"
Is there any truth to the claim marketers make that exposure to these messages teaches kids to be savvier consumers?
The little research I was able to find on this shows that the more exposed to commercial messages children are, the less critical they are of those messages. If we wanted to train kids in advertising literacy, we would do that. You don't do it by showing them commercials.
Why were kids' marketers so open to sharing their tricks of the trade with you?
I got my initial entree to the advertising world through the Advertising Education Foundation, which places professors inside agencies so that they can get a better understanding of what these agencies do. Ironically, part of the reason they let me in was that the industry felt it had a bad reputation in academia, especially in the field of liberal arts. The industry used to focus on business school grads, but now the kind of work they're doing requires students with a liberal arts and social science background. Then, once I was in, each marketer that I met seemed to be very willing to introduce me to other people that they knew. And truthfully, one of the reasons why I got as much information as I did is because I encountered a lot of guilty people.
