Advertising & Marketing Directed Toward Children

Excerpted from
What Kids Really Want That Money Can't Buy: Tips for Parenting in a Commercial World
By Betsy Taylor

Critics warn that advertising directed toward children may be contributing to the rising number of American children who are stressed out, depressed, hyperactive, obese, exhausted, insomniac, even violent. "Advertising is contributing greatly to a consumer identity in children in which they believe and behave as if they can't be happy unless they constantly acquire more goods and services," according to Allen Kanner, clinical psychologist at Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. Kids seem on the brink of losing so much that is precious: core values, family time, connection to community and nature, and creative down time. What many of them have instead is intense peer rivalry based on material goods.

As parents, we must become more aware of the forces influencing our children's values and behavior. Several factors contribute to our material culture (which Juliet Schor, author of The Overspent American, describes as the "see, want, borrow, buy" way of life), including the extraordinary affluence of the top segments of our society and a correlating national preoccupation with extravagant celebrity lifestyles. But the most insidious-and the clearest cause for distress-is marketing and advertising. The background noise in the United States today is the hum of ads sending us nonstop sales pitches, and our kids are especially vulnerable to their power.

How Big Is the Problem?

Marketers are openly courting children on an unprecedented scale, all in the name of creating brand loyalty as soon as a child is old enough to ask for a product by name, distinguish corporate logos, or recite product jingles. Usually, that's not old enough to go to school or even (reliably) to use the potty. Corporations go after children because lifetime customers add up to years of profitable revenue.

One advertising industry magazine (named Kidscreen-a whole journal devoted to selling to kids!) reports that ad agencies are now targeting "the 0-3 demographic." They call it "cradle-to-grave marketing." Kids are bombarded with ads all day long, at home, at school, and on the street. Their clothes (and their friends' clothes) are covered with commercial messages. Their time on the web is punctuated with ads. Add magazine, newspaper, radio, and of course television ads, along with movie product placements and commercial posters, and this is what you get: The average American child is exposed to forty hours a week of commercial messages, according to research from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The vast majority come from one source: television. Ninety-nine percent of children in the United States live in a home with one or more televisions. Nearly a third of all children live in homes with four or more TVs, and 24 percent of children under six have TVs in their bedrooms, according to data from 1996 in the Journal of Advertising Research.

Americans in general spend 40 percent of their free time watching television, and children are usually the most avid viewers, watching on average two and three-quarters hours on a typical day. The average twelve-year-old spends four hours a day watching TV. That's the same as two months per year of nonstop television!

The amount of time Americans-and kids in particular-spend in front of the tube has risen dramatically over recent decades. (Just as spending on advertising aimed at children has. Coincidence? You decide.) The average American child sees between twenty and forty thousand television commercials each year-more than fifty to a hundred every day.

Those who are concerned about the violence kids watch on TV are fighting the good fight. But the manipulative messages children see between programs are perpetrating another kind of violence directly on kids while they sit in front of the screen. The constant stream of commercial pitches to buy happiness warps children's spirits in its own devastating way.

By the time they are three, before they can read, many American kids are making specific requests for brand-name products. That's the payoff for years of sophisticated marketing to children: Experts have shown that at six months of age, as they are starting to make simple sounds like "ma-ma," babies are also beginning to form mental images of corporate logos and mascots. A 1991 study showed that 91 percent of six-year-olds could correctly identify Joe Camel with Camel cigarettes. Cigarettes! Teachers in preschools report that children know more television commercial jingles than traditional songs such as "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and the alphabet song. A friend of mine told me of her horror at attending her daughter's day care "spring show" only to hear the three-year-olds' rousing rendition of a song with this syncopated refrain: "McDonald's, McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a Pizza Hut!"

No wonder a Time/CNN poll showed that 71 percent of parents said their kids are exposed to too much advertising. Almost two out of three parents want networks to cut back on ads aimed at kids, and the same proportion say Internet providers are not doing enough to protect kids from online marketing. At best, kids who surf the web are being bombarded with ads in chat rooms and on Internet game and music sites. At worst, they are encouraged to buy pornographic or other destructive products. In a survey by National Public Radio, 31 percent of children ages ten to seventeen reported having seen a pornographic site on the Internet. According to a 1999 poll commissioned by the Center for a New American Dream, 87 percent of parents of children ages two to seventeen feel that advertising and marketing aimed at children make kids too materialistic, and a similar number say that these commercial forces are hurting kids' values.