Stay Tuned/Parents vs Ad Culture

The latest issue of Consumer Reports has a dismaying article about advertising to children. It starts by telling about one six-year-old in Colorado who went off to first grade and came back loaded with advertising. His free book covers touted all sorts of products. Then he declared that Pizza Hut was his favorite pizza, which his father attributes to a school reading program that rewards students with pizza coupons. Then he told his parents about a school movie on tooth care which promoted brushing with a specific brand of toothpaste.

If you don't have kids and you don't happen to be a teacher, then you probably haven't been inside an elementary or high school lately. I was in one a few years back and I was stunned by the amount of advertising. When I went to high school (which was in the mid- to late-80's), I remember a controversy over whether the school should accept these "news boards" which had current events articles - but also had a fair amount of advertising. Now advertising is everywhere in the schools, and the schools themselves are taking an unfair share of the blame.

Frankly put, selling out to the advertisers is sometimes the only way a school can get the money to do "non-essential" things, such as replacing athletic equipment and buying supplementary textbooks and other class materials. In the worst situations, it's money the school vitally needs to keep running. Of course, the simple solution is to give the schools more money. But then, maybe that's too obvious.

At this point I should note a potential reason to recuse myself: I am a lapsed education major, and the main reason I got out of the teaching business before ever giving it a chance was the horrendously low salaries paid across the country to educators. So I have an obvious axe to grind. If you don't want your kids to be stupid, then give the teachers more money, and if you don't want your kids bombarded with ads, give the schools more money. There. Isn't that simple?

Of course it's never that simple. In Massachusetts, for example, a new teacher certification program recently came into effect, and the teachers did dismally. It's not enough to be well-paid if you don't want to teach - or if your own education was so horrendous that you don't have the background necessary to do so.

More relevantly for this column, fighting advertising in the schools is really not a complete solution to the problem. Advertising to kids, as Consumer Reports points out, has increased hugely across the board - on TV, on billboards, on the web, in schools, everywhere. Even adult products (by which I mean things like cars, not porn!) are now occasionally pitched to kids.

Advertisers have discovered that kids can fixate on specific brands and pressure their parents to buy them - the so-called "nag factor" or "whine factor." This is a change from advertising philosophy of ten or twenty years ago, where the conventional wisdom in the ad community was that kids were attracted to certain kinds of products, like animals to shiny objects, but without much discernment between brands or the ability to retain brand names. This was clearly wrong - just try foisting a fake Beanie Baby on a kid and see what happens.

Also, kids are actually spending non-negligible amounts of money. CR notes that spending by kids ages 4 to 12 has tripled in the 90's, rising to $24.4 billion last year. No word from the magazine on how the kids got their hands on that kind of money in the first place, but they clearly respect the fact that kids need to be shown how to handle their discretionary income - CR has a version of their magazine for kids, called Zillions. I've seen it and it's excellent.

My attitude about kids and advertising is a little calmer than CR's. I figure that kids will do what I did when I was a kid - buy the toy that's been hyped on TV (or have it bought for them), realize it's a hunk of junk, and eventually become as jaded about ads as I am.

OK, that's too optimistic, especially in a world where some of the parents haven't learned to be cynical about ads. However, I note that as a child, I did gradually learn not only when something was junk, but also how to tell when a major purchase was going to be something I played with once and then left in the closet. (I backslide on this every now and then, though.)

The part of the CR article which really bothered me was this paragraph:

Not only is advertising in schools pervasive, but some sponsored classroom materials give a biased view of public-policy issues. Workbooks that address global warming, for example, subtly steer class lessons in directions advantageous to the sponsor.

A toy may break within minutes of purchase, but a political position can last forever. To underscore this, yesterday I was in my neighborhood wholesale club and I saw a toy chainsaw. I find the idea of a toy chainsaw abhorrent enough - the things scare me - but this one, the label told me, was an Eco-Ranger chain saw.

Ah, yes! For chopping down primary-growth forests in an ecologically sound fashion! Be the first child on your block to play at destroying owl habitats!

I sense danger here.

Meanwhile, in the grocery store, the kidmarketing spreads further and further. Macaroni and cheese was never really an adult food - although I eat it a lot because I'm just a childlike person - but Kraft keeps pushing the envelope. In a trip to the grocery store yesterday (after going to the wholesale club, of course - big items go at the bottom of the trunk) I saw that:

- The regular Kraft M&C has a "NickelOScope" on the back of the package, as a tie-in to Nickelodeon's "NickelOZone" programming;
- There is shaped Rugrats pasta, another Nick tie-in;
- There is pasta shaped like Warner Brothers animated characters;
- There is pasta shaped like DC superhero emblems, another Warner tie-in.

What does this prove (aside from that, as I commented many long months ago, we lead the world in extruded food technology)? It proves that there's a vicious circle whereby Kraft hawks Rugrats so that when the tykes watch Rugrats they'll be ready for the Kraft commercials. It proves that Warner, Viacom, and Kraft Foods all think that the kid market is worth scads of development money. It proves that your kid is on the firing line.

But you probably already knew that.

I saw a new line of kid's drinks in the grocery store. These little plastic bottles of Kool-Aid-like drinks come in packs of six, and have pictures of professional wrestlers on the outer sleeve, as well as the (licensed, one hopes) World Wrestling Federation logo. The flavors I saw were "Backbreaker Blue," "Dropkick Orange," and "Piledriver Punch." The name of the brand of beverages: Body Slam.

The WWF, by the by, just bought Debbie Reynolds' hotel/casino complex in Las Vegas. I shudder to think what they're going to do with it.

Kraft also owns Post cereal. Not surprisingly, Post has begun doing Nickelodeon tie-ins. I don't imagine they'll get Roger Sawdey to explain that. His daughters are too old for such things.

[March 2007:] The above comment, which now requires footnotes, referred to the Post worker who was then appearing in "candid" commercials for his company with his daughters. A sample transcript:

Sawdey: I'm Roger Sawdey. I make Nabisco Shredded Wheat here at Post Cereals.
Daughters: That's our dad!
Sawdey: You know, when my girls were younger, I couldn't get them near a box of Shredded Wheat.
Daughters: That's for sure!
Sawdey: So you want to know how it happened? Well, it wasn't because I've been bringing it home for the last 20 years.
Daughters: Sorry, Dad.
Sawdey: Now that they're on their own, it seems like bottled water isn't the only good thing they've discovered.
Daughter: How come you never told us how good this stuff is?
Daughter: Yeah, Dad.
Sawdey: Now you'd think they invented Shredded Wheat.
Daughters: This stuff is good.

The World Wildlife Fund successfully sued the World Wrestling Federation for using the WWF initials in ways that violated a prior limit agreement, and the latter promptly changed its name to World Wrestling Entertainment. The Debby Reynolds hotel/casino, as of 2001, was the Greek Isles hotel/casino (and as of 2005, appears to be closed). Keeping track of Vegas hotel changes is nearly as involved as keeping track of corporate ownership changes for food brands.

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