Susan Linn, Ed.D.

Children today stand at the center of an unprecedented maelstrom of marketing. It undermines all aspects of their lives. Today, you will hear how it affects their health, their education, their creativity, their sense of self and well being and their family life.

Children have become big business. In 1997, corporations spent over 12 billion dollars marketing to kids. That's about double what was spent in 1992.1 And now, children influence-directly and indirectly-over $500 billion a year in spending.

Corporate interest in selling to children is so intense, that the marketing conference Advertising and Promoting to Kids, held in this hotel, is only the tip of a giant iceberg. Later this month, Kid Power Latin America will be held in Miami and Teen Power 2001 will take place in Chicago. San Diego will host Kid Power Food & Beverage Marketing next January. And so on. Even as we hold this summit, the people who market to children have gathered together to refine their skills. One thing they learn at these conferences is how to exploit developmental vulnerabilities. On the agenda tomorrow is a session on marketing to girls, including a focus on "Brand Awareness and Lifelong Brand Affinity in the Early Teen Years. One strategy for reaching teens that the publication Marketing Tools described as tried and true is playing off teen insecurities. Girls in their early teens certainly have a lot of those!

People attending the "Ethnic Marketing" session tomorrow, designed to help advertisers target children of color more effectively, will learn about attitudes, behaviors and preferences-specific to gender and age in each ethnicity (they call it each market).

The landscape of advertising and promoting to kids today is unlike the television commercials you and I experienced as children. In fact, comparing the marketing of yesteryear to marketing today 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 corporate dollars.

How did it get like this? One answer is deregulation, which will be discussed in detail later on. Another answer is access. Children consume almost forty hours of media a week after school, making it easier than ever before for marketers to come between them and their parents. It's not just television commercials that parents have to worry about now-it's marketing on the Internet, and in videos and in movies and in magazines and on the radio and even in books, like books for babies designed to look just like packages for Fruit Loops and other snacks and cereals. It's product placement and other methods of embedding advertising seamlessly into content. It's tie-in marketing, where toys and other products are linked to tv programs and movies, promoted in fast food restaurants or on the backs of cereal boxes. We also have to worry about the escalation of marketing in schools, and about companies like Streetwise Concepts and Culture, that amassed an army of 30,000 children to promote their products to other kids.

The industry spin is that parents should be able to control marketing's effect on children. But how can one family combat a multi-billion dollar industry? The industry talks about "responsible" marketing to children. But at a time when childhood obesity is a major public health problem, what is a responsible candy commercial aimed at children? The industry claims that children today are savvy about marketing. But here's a quote from one advertiser about what that means, "What parents are telling us is that kids are requesting brands and are brand-aware as soon as their verbal skills set in. Is early brand recognition a sign of sophistication? I don't think so. It's a sign that even babies respond to marketing.

So we are here today-because we care passionately about children, because we know that they hold the future in their hands, and because we see them as they deserve to be seen-as whole, complex human beings-not as a consumer group.

FOOTNOTES

¹ Lauro, PW (1999) “Coaxing the smile that sells: Baby wranglers in demand in marketing for children.” New York Times, November 1. Facts attributed to psychologist James McNeal.

² Packaged Facts. “The Kids Market.” New York: MarketResearch.com, March 2000.

³ Packaged Facts. “The Kids Market.” New York: MarketResearch.com, March 2000.

⁴ Reese, Shelly (1997) Marketing Tools. July.5.

⁵ Roberts, DF et al (1999) Kids & Media @ the New Millennium. Menlo Park, CA: The Henry J. Kaiser Family  Foundation.

⁶Lacayo, Richard. “Search for a perfect pitch.” Time, July 23, 2001..

⁷Paul Kurnit, of Griffin Bacal, in Hood, Duncan, Is advertising to kids wrong?  Marketers respond.  Kidscreen, November 2000. Pg. 15-18