Born to Shop: How Marketers Brainwash Babies

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted December 13, 2007.

Santa's shopping is in full swing. Peak season for what I consider child abuse, family abuse and democracy abuse -- marketing to children. I'm of the baby boomer generation. When I was a kid, there was Tony the Tiger hawking Frosted Flakes and little elves selling me cookies, but marketing to children was peanuts -- well, probably Cracker Jacks.

Everything has changed, and changed gradually on such a scale that we are paying an enormous price -- in kids' physical, mental and emotional health, and in the health of our families and our democracy.

From 1992 to 1997, the amount of money spent on marketing to children doubled, from $6.2 to $12.7 billion. Today they are spending over $15 billion. Children influence purchases totaling over $600 billion a year. Children spend almost 40 hours a week outside of school consuming media, most of which is commercially driven. The average child sees about 40,000 commercials each on television alone. 65 percent of children 8-18 have a television in their bedroom.

Earlier this year 11 companies agreed to voluntarily scale back their marketing to children in an effort to slow down the rise in obesity.

Susan Linn, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, weighs in on this effort and what's at stake. Linn is the Associate Director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children's Center and a co-founder of the coalition Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. An award winning ventriloquist, Dr. Linn created video based classroom materials Different and the Same: Helping Children Identify and Prevent Prejudice (with the producers of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood). In the face of our media-saturated commercialized culture, she encourages make-believe play. She is the author of Consuming Kids.

Terrence McNally: Those numbers in the intro are a few years old. Have they gotten much worse?

Susan Linn: What has gotten worse is that commercials are just so 20th century now. The number of commercials that children see on television has become practically irrelevant -- because they're seeing them so many other places. On the web and in school, through brand licensing and product placement in movies and television programs and even books, and through viral marketing. Marketing has essentially permeated every aspect of children's lives, and that's what marketers want. They want to insinuate their brands into the fabric of children's lives.

McNally: Colonizing parts of your brain and your heart and your identity. What got you interested in this?

Linn: It's a complicated question for me. I was raising a child at home, so it was affecting my life directly. I worked with children, and I could see it in their lives. And I was in a position at the Media Center to begin tracking it. By the late '90s, advertising and marketing to kids had gotten so pervasive that I felt somebody had to do something. It violates most of what I think is important about being a human being.

McNally: What pushed you over the edge?

Linn: Teletubbies transformed me from a concerned clinician and aggravated mom into an activist. That was 1998. I really believe in public television -- and it was the idea that my public television station would import a television program from Britain and market it as educational for babies, when they had no evidence of that. But the idea that they would exploit the trust of American parents that way was kind of the last straw for me. That's when I realized that this wasn't just a problem I was struggling with, but it really was a societal issue.

McNally: Though television commercials are so 20th century, could you talk a bit about the way television marketing evolved over the years. From innocent Keebler elves to the linkage of almost every show with a toy. There are hours Saturday mornings where everything you see is something you can buy.

Linn: I think that it evolved for a couple of reasons. First is the proliferation of electronic media. One of the reasons that commercialism was limited when you were growing up is because there just weren't that many avenues for marketing to reach kids. It's not that they didn't want to. I'm also a boomer ... The early television programs that we loved ... Do you go back as far as Howdy Doody?

McNally: Howdy Doody, Romper Room.

Linn: Kukla, Fran and Ollie.

McNally: They were so low tech and so low key.

Linn: But they were filled with product placement.

Kukla, Fran, and Ollie was filled with product placement. Howdy Doody was actually totally commercials for Wonder Bread and just about everything else -- but it was only on once a day.

McNally: We'd watch a half-an-hour or an hour, then go out to play.

Linn: Now kids see a program not once but several times a day. There are so many choices of programs for kids, and they can get them on so many venues -- iPods and cellphones and portable DVD players. Kids are so much more saturated with media, and with the marketing that goes with it. That's one thing. And then there was the deregulation of everything in the 1980s.

See more stories tagged with: advertising, children, obesity, media

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org).

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »