Especially for Parents

News and Commentary by Sharon Secor
April 2004

Created Especially for Children

By the year 2007, teens and preteens will wield a hefty $243 billion worth of purchasing power, according to estimates in a report published in November 2002 by Datamonitor, a consumer research and information company utilized by such corporate giants as General Mills, Hershey, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and the Kellogg Company. In a December 2003 report, Datamonitor noted that "children (3 to 9 year olds) are becoming increasingly important as consumers as both their income and their influence over their parents increase."

"Young children are uniquely vulnerable to commercial persuasion," said psychologist Dale Kunkel, Ph.D., Professor of Communication at the University of California at Santa Barbara and senior author of the February 20, 2004, Report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on Advertising and Children, as quoted in The Jim Box: Taking Ad-vantage of Our Kids, published in the February 27, 2004, Common Sense Media newsletter.

"Young children lack the cognitive skills and abilities of older children and adults, they do not comprehend commercial messages in the same way as do more mature audiences," according to the APA Task Force on Advertising and Children.

In her March 2, 2004, testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Subcommittee on Competition, Foreign Commerce, and Infrastructure, Victoria Rideout, a vice-president of the Kaiser Family Foundation and director of its Program for the Study of Entertainment Media and Health, stated that "in recent years, there has been an intense new focus in the marketing world on marketing to kids."

Indeed, advertisers spent almost $8 billion dollars on television commercials designed to stoke the flame of desire in our nation's children and harness their remarkable modern spending power, according to a report by Bill McConnell, published in the March 8, 2004, issue of Broadcasting & Cable.

With the spending power of children reaching epic proportions, perhaps it is no coincidence that children, too, are achieving immense proportions. Citing information from the U.S. Surgeon General, McConnell reported that the number of children over 6 years of age that are overweight has more than doubled in the past 20 years. With this increase has come a sharp rise in associated illnesses and diseases, including diseases like Type 2 diabetes that once primarily affected adults.

"Every year, children see an estimated 40,000 TV ads; most of those ads are for food; and most of the foods advertised are things like cereals, candies, sodas, chips and fast foods," said Rideout in her testimony before the Subcommittee.

The APA Task Force on Advertising and Children found that "53% of all children aged 2-18 years have a television in their bedroom." Just over one quarter of all children between 2 and 4 years of age and 39% of children 5 to 7 years of age can be found watching their own televisions in their own bedrooms.

It is, perhaps, a testament to the APA's findings concerning a certain lack of cognitive maturity in young viewers that a study cited in The Role of Media in Childhood Obesity, a February 2004 publication of the Kaiser Family Foundation, found that "70% of 6- to 8-year olds believed that fast foods were more nutritious than home-cooked foods." And, that study took place before the advent of widespread Internet use by children.

Both the APA Task Force on Advertising and Children and the Kaiser Family Foundation reports explored the increasing role of the Internet as a marketing tool to reach young children. In addition to the numerous convenience foods and snack products that, through various licensing agreements, take on the images of favorite media characters, and the toy and game industries that are tightly intertwined with cartoon favorites like Pokemon, there are many web sites that also use these images and characters to attract children. These sites generally feature games and child-oriented content, but a primary objective is to advertise products and create brand loyalty.

"Brand preferences can be manipulated by exposure to a single commercial," explained the APA Task Force report, "although stronger effects (e.g., increased desire for the advertised product; increased preference for the advertised brand over other competing brands) are more likely to result from repeated exposure." In addition, especially for children, commercials that make use of a well-known or greatly admired media figure tend to be among the most effective means capturing their attention.

This concept of creating brand awareness and loyalty is of concern to the APA, among other organizations, as it is not only food and toys that enjoy the benefits of attracting the notice of children through aggressive advertising. According to the APA report, "in a study of alcohol-brand awareness, nearly as many 9- and 10-year-olds were able to identify the Budweiser frogs as could identify Bugs Bunny." Which is not surprising considering that in addition to the usual barrage of high-budget beer advertising, according to a March 10, 2004, report in the New York Post, "games were featured on 10 of 15 beer Web sites." A recently released study conducted by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Georgetown University and cited in the Post article, revealed that "alcohol-company Web sites received nearly 700,000 visits by underage people from July through December."

This early establishing of brand preferences clearly takes on a different meaning when it moves beyond Cat In The Hat Pop-Tarts and breakfast cereal and Scooby-Doo cheese crackers to rapper Ludacris selling Anheuser-Busch products. With children being able to play video and computer games featuring a character based on the rapper, and rap music having attained mainstream status, Ludacris is, like so many other rap performers, well-known by both children and adults. Indeed, through the years, numerous rappers have made guest appearances on such mainstream children's programs as Sesame Street. In the song titled Sunny Days, rappers Warren G., Nate Dogg, and Snoop Doggy Dog—also known for his work in the video porn industry—rap over the beat of the Sesame Street theme song.

According to the December 2003 Datamonitor report titled Children's Consumption Behaviors and Occasions, "children are increasingly displaying trends and behaviors more commonly associated with older youths, even adults." This is, in part, due to aggressive and successful marketing strategies.

The APA report detailed the means by which advertisers of many products not meant for consumption by young children still reach these youngsters with their ad campaigns. Citing reports by the Federal Trade Commission, the APA noted that "the majority of violent media offerings with mature ratings (R-rated movies, recordings with Parental Advisory labels, and M-rated electronic games) had marketing plans that targeted children who, according to the rating or label, were too young to see, hear, or play them." Marketers of PG-13 movies were found to advertise "in programming blocks popular with children under 11 years old, such as Saturday morning cartoon shows." In addition, "fast-food tie-ins and licensing with toy companies were also identified as prominent means of promoting PG-13 movies to younger children."

The ADA and Kaiser Family Foundation reports recommend changing and limiting marketing geared towards children. Victoria Rideout presented these recommendations in her testimony before the Subcommittee. Among these recommendations for change are the complete banning of any advertising to preschoolers and, according to Rideout's testimony, "changing the wording of disclaimers in children's advertising to make them more understandable." The FTC continues to pay close attention to the advertising of inappropriate material to children, noting that there has been a certain degree of improvement within the industry with increased FTC efforts at controlling such marketing practices.

During this year's annual TV Turn-off week, April 19 through 25, participating parents may want to make a market-oriented analysis of the media their children consume - what do they gain and at what cost? Do the costs exceed the gains? In the end, children have purchasing power because parents allow them to. Parents, as TV Turn-off week reminds us, are the best protection a child has against slick ad campaigns created especially for children.