Advertising to Children Impacts on a Future Generation of Citizen-Consumers?

Texts and Topics Juliet Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (2004) Malcolm Gladwell, “The Coolhunt” (1997) Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood (Media Education Foundation, 2008)　

Anti-adultism

More than $1.6 billion is spent by food and beverage companies each year on marketing products to younger consumers, according to Federal Trade Commission figures. Research conducted by Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity found that: “Children prefer the taste of foods branded with images of popular cartoon characters and choose those foods more often than unbranded ones.”  This goes to show that kids prefer a vibrant and fun product over a mundane item. http://ajstrat.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/new-forms-of-food-advertisements-are-reaching-out-to-kids/. 10 Oct. 2010

http://www.girlsintelligenceagency.com/

Ad industry’s three lines of defense they are empowering kids advertising to kids is necessary for the economic health of the industry parents are the guilty party www.thebettermom.com

Schor discusses Channel One, 86-88 According to Wikipedia, “Channel One News is a 12 minute news program for teens broadcast via satellite to middle schools and high schools across the United States. Channel One is owned by Alloy Media + Marketing and based in New York City. Channel One markets to approximately eight thousand schools across the United States and reaches six million students. It is mostly common in Middle and High Schools.” Also, “In 2006, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that research in dicated that children who watched Channel One remembered the commercials more than they remembered the news.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_One_News#Controversy Schor discusses Channel One, 86-88

Decommercializing Childhood Advocate for legislation that would more highly regulate advertising and the media Become aware of the types of advertising taking place in schools; Become more aware of commercialization in the home

Why do your clients hire you guys. What are they looking for Why do your clients hire you guys? What are they looking for? What do they do with the information you give them? [Dee Dee] Gordon: I think they're looking to us to be kind of the eyes and ears of youth culture. It's a difficult job. You can't understand a whole culture by checking in every now and then or a phone here or an article there. So they kind of rely on us as a resource to say, "This is what's going on" all the time, to give them kind of a pulse. ...For instance, we have some clients who are interested in taking a product that already exists and finding a way that it can appeal to young people. So they will use our information to find out if that product is even interesting to them or if there's a way that they could make it more interesting. Same thing with advertising. They like to test whether or not their advertising is relevant to these kids or what kind of advertising is relevant, so that they can do something similar. Or let's say they want to like create a whole new brand or a whole new product with a company that targets a specific audience. They take out information to assist in inspiring project designers, in helping them market the new product, even in naming the product, and then eventually testing. They use our database to recruit kids to test the products out, stuff like that. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/etc/hunting.html

...How does a trend spread? [Sharon]Lee: ...Actually it's a triangle. At the top of the triangle there's the innovator, which is like two to three percent of the population. Underneath them is the trend-setter, which we would say is about 17 percent. And what they do is they pick up on ideas that the innovators are doing and they kind of claim them as their own. Underneath them is an early adopter, which is questionable exactly what their percentage is, but they kind of are the layer above mainstream, which is about 80 percent. And what they do is they take what the trend-setter is doing and they make it palatable for mass consumption. They take it, they tweak it, they make it more acceptable, and that's when the mass consumer picks up on it and runs with it and then it actually kills it. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/etc/hunting.html