Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood

By Susan Linn, Ed.D.

Against the ruin of the world there is only one defense:  The creative act. -Kenneth Rexroth

We are here today to speak out on behalf of children, caught in an unprecedented maelstrom of corporate marketing. We are here to educate and to protest. As we speak, in another room in this hotel, marketing executives are learning how better to exploit children in the marketplace. Downtown, the American International Toy Fair is celebrating “The Business of Play,” a gargantuan enterprise marketing toys to children that promote passivity, violence, junk food, and precocious sexuality while discouraging play’s fundamental benefits--creativity, problem solving, self expression and the chance to wrestle safely with the meaning of life experiences.

Marketing is what links childhood obesity, eating disorders, violence and other public health concerns. It is linked to materialistic values, even as it undermines family values. Marketing to children in the United States is out of control. It is escalating unchecked. It is virtually unregulated and its industry practices are unexamined. 

Comparing the marketing of today with the marketing of yesteryear is like comparing a BB gun to a smart bomb. It’s enhanced by technology, honed by child psychologists and brought to us by billions of dollars. We can no longer think of marketing to children merely as commercials on Saturday morning television. In the new millennium, marketing executives are insinuating their brands into the fabric of children’s lives. They want--to use industry terms--to “own” children; “cradle to grave” brand loyalty; and “share of mind.” 

Toward these ends, modern day marketing is characterized by a range of intrusive strategies. Some may be familiar to you.  Some may come as a surprise.  All are increasingly common:

Product Licensing: The act of selling use of an image or logo to promote products other than the ones they were created for. At one web site I counted 181 Cat in the Hat products—not including food.[i]  Sponge Bob Square Pants–Kraft’s top selling macaroni and cheese in 2002--sells candy, cereal, macaroni and cheese, clothing, toys and accessories. 

Product Placement: Where products are incorporated into the fabric of a TV program, a movie, computer game, or even a book as props, scenery, or plot points.  We have books for babies selling candy. Television programs hawking soda. Movies hawking hamburgers. 

Promotions and Contests: The recent Cat in the Hat movie engaged in promotions with about twelve different companies promoting forty different brands including Cascade, Mr. Clean, Febreze, Dawn, and Swiffer, Master Card, Frito Lay snacks, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Hershey's Kisses, Smucker's, Jif peanut butter, Pepsi, Frito-Lay snacks and Burger King.   

Co-Branding:   In which two known brands, such as Barbie and Coca-Cola, combine for specific products—for instance, toys that are now advertisements for food such as Coca Cola Barbie, McDonald’s Barbie, and Pizza Hut Barbie.

Grass Roots Marketing: The process of building brand relationships with schools, churches, and influential community members and exploiting social issues as marketing opportunities. As one company put it, “Reach(ing) your target audience where they live, work and play.”   

Viral Marketing: Began as the phenomenon of marketers entering Internet chat rooms frequented by kids in order to promote specific products. Now it refers to any orchestrated word-of-mouth marketing, including the practice of using children to advertise products to their friends. 

Guerilla Marketing: Using public space as a venue for advertising, such as plastering bus kiosks where school busses stop with ads for products. 

Program-length commercials: Made legal after advertising on children’s television was deregulated in 1984, program-length commercials allow television programs to be created to sell products. For instance 4Kids, distributors of the Pokemon and Yo Gi Go empire, now control the Saturday morning block on Fox.   

Advergaming: In which companies like Nike or Kraft Foods integrate products into existing computer games and create games specifically for corporate web sites.  Kraft operates Candystand, a website devoted to games and contests featuring Life Savers, Planters peanuts and other candies. 

Marketing in Schools, and through co-branding with—or co-opting--non profit groups that protect children’s health and well-being such as schools, or professional health and education organizations. 

Naming Rights:  We have a Shop Rite school gymnasium in New Jersey, the Please Touch Museum Presented by McDonalds in Philadelphia, and Burger King Academies all over the country. 

I began with a quote from Kenneth Rexroth, and I would like to end with one from the philosopher and theologian Reinhold Neiber:  “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime.  Therefore we are saved by hope.”  

The situation is dire. The odds seem overwhelming, but we are more hopeful today than ever before. As you will hear in the hours that follow, we are seeing an unprecedented level of anger, frustration, and activism among parents, health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups and plain old concerned citizens. Marketing to children is not just a family problem. It is a societal problem. And, like all of society’s ills, it will change only through intense effort and collaboration across race, class, disciplines and political ideology. Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children was created to facilitate that movement. Our work this weekend–here and tomorrow at our noon protest at Toy Fair--is essential to that process.

Susan Linn, EdD (slinn@jbcc.harvard.edu) is the associate director of the Media Center of Judge Baker Children's Center and instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is the author of the forthcoming book Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood.