Fatherhood

Monsters Inc.

By: Paul Scott; Photograph: Gregg Segal
Dec 21, 2008 - 4:50:40 PM

How to thwart the $17 billion marketing effort to steal your kids' dreams, hijack their imaginations, make them obese, and drive a wedge into their relationship with you

I thought I could win the battle for my child's brain. I thought I could outsmart the campaign to embed logos (and the animated characters that shill for them) deep within my 4-year-old's operating code before she so much as understands that caterpillars become butterflies. My daughter, Parker, a tall girl with sandy brown hair and enormous blue eyes, has been largely shielded from brands and the plethora of screens used to spread their fairy dust. At home, she has no access to cable TV and views only parent-approved DVDs and sporadic bouts of PBS Kids. She doesn't know how to use the remote control, doesn't have a cell phone, has no access to video games, and knows only the kind of web made by spiders. She likes to paint, play tag, pick tomatoes, and dance when no one is looking. She remains clueless about the Kids' Choice Awards, Radio Disney, FrootLoops.com, and avatars. I realize that in the eyes of some parents, this makes me a little uptight.

In our daughter's presence, my wife and I mute commercials, spell out the names of chain stores, and refer to Ronald McDonald as "the clown," but we cannot keep our little girl in a marketing-free bubble. Thanks to an aunt, Hello Kitty has become her starter Abercrombie & Fitch, signifying who knows what. Thanks to her grandparents--okay, and a few times her dad--she has half a dozen of the 40,000 items adorned with the Disney princesses. And lately, we have watched in resignation as the alien baby of tween marketing has grown in her preschooler belly. She has neither seen nor heard the Jonas Brothers, for instance, but she spontaneously declared the group to be a good band. The other day, we found a pair of 3-D glasses in her cubby at day care, kid swag promoting the Hannah Montana section at Wal-Mart. Now she is familiar with a band, a television show, and a discount chain she has not heard, seen, or visited. Did I tell you she has grown-up consumer preferences (she wants a convertible like Barbie's) and grown-up appearance issues (she wants blond hair). Did I tell you she is 4?

Well, I'm not uptight, okay, and I don't live off the grid or in a yurt. I'm just a dad who has figured out that the business of selling things to kids has reached a fever pitch in this country, and even the best efforts of parents to defend their children from the onslaught can leave them feeling surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned. I have also learned that researchers have linked this phenomenon with a host of negative consequences for kids. Childhood obesity and the sexualization of girls garner the headlines, but those who have studied the problem say these issues are simply the more glaring symptoms of a larger illness. Recent research links marketing and its sidekick, consumerism, to an increased risk for a broad spectrum of ills, including conflicts at school, conflicts with parents, psychological distress, indifference toward others, and a disregard for the world itself. Exposing a child to high levels of marketing, in other words, is a great way to make a child unhappy, unsuccessful, and unlikable. Most of us think of marketing as ads, but with shows having become toys having become brands, the most innocent of stuffed toys is no longer as innocent as it seems. "Even Sesame Street has an army of Elmo dolls out there now," says Michael Rich, MD, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital in Boston. "For a child, these products are a connection to Sesame Street. The relationship they have developed with the program and its characters is leveraged to make them desire that brand. They're just learning to be consumers, a mentality that says, 'If only I can have that, I will be happy.' "

For those who say "ba-loney," that advertising has always been with us, there's no comparing your memories of 30-second ads with the 24-7, 360-degree, multimedia Manhattan Project now under way to own your children's brains. In the past 25 years, marketing to children--an ethically indefensible practice that enjoys virtually no popular support and yet faces little oversight--has grown from $100 million worth of holiday-time ads, to a $17 billion effort to seed brands and licensed characters into every corner of children's lives. With the convergence of technology that connects televisions, cell phones, and the Web, kid-brand gurus have developed an unprecedented array of Trojan-horse methods to enter your kid's head and capture his mind. What's at stake is more than a few dollars, it's the internal emotional adventure of childhood itself.

Into Elmo's Den
It's early on the second day of the Ninth Annual KidScreen Summit, a high-powered conference that drew to New York City more than 1,300 animators, video and Web site designers, cable honchos, licensing experts, and assorted Net 2.0 types pulling the strings behind the global business of entertaining and marketing to kids. Technically, this is a conference about entertaining kids, and to be fair, there are a great number of children's programming participants here who do what they do out of an overriding interest in making kids smile through the use of screens. But with children, the wall between entertaining and marketing has crumbled. How else to explain the session today titled "Beyond the Click-Through," in which a panel of the smartest minds in children's Web site development trades notes on how to make kid-oriented Web sites even stickier. The FCC regulates children's television advertising, but aside from child-safety legislation, fewer restrictions apply on the Web, and marketers now view the Internet as a place to get more engaged eyeballs for less money and more time. The presenters talked about customizing characters, the difference between successful children's TV shows and Web sites, and the optimum frequency of refreshed content. "You want to give the opportunity for kids to play with your brand," said Zack Zeiler, one of the panelists and the president and CEO of Visual Perspectives Internet Inc., an interactive Web company that creates games for adults' and children's Web sites, usually tied to products.

Zeiler had invoked the real game changer in the big business of marketing to children: While parents may fret about 30-second commercial breaks during cartoons, the marketers have basically left TV ads in the rearview mirror and moved on to dunking kids in 25-minute-long bouts of online "brand immersion." The goal: Turn your kid into their very own salesman. "At the Geppetto Group," reads the influential marketing firm's promotional copy, "we view integrated marketing as an opportunity to invite consumers to actively participate in the brand." The company views kids as the target. It promises to guide these "targets" down a yellow brick road "from brand awareness to investigation, from investigation to selection, to repeat purchase, to loyalty, and ultimately, to advocacy." It sounds far-fetched, but it's happening.

Of the 96 food, beverage, and candy companies that advertise most heavily on children's television, 85 percent of them had Web sites loaded with games seemingly designed for no purpose other than to extend the duration and increase the personal bonding of a child's brand exposure, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2006 report "It's Child's Play: Advergaming and the Online Marketing of Food to Children." The sites offered kids the ability to watch actual commercials (53 percent of the time), to customize their stay at the Web site in some way (73 percent of the time), to be marketed an unrelated movie or TV show (47 percent of the time), and even to become viral carriers of the brand via the sending of brand-touting e-mail greetings to friends (64 percent of the time). During the three-month period under study, there were 12.2 million visits by children ages 2 to 11.

In the Q & A that followed the KidScreen session, someone from the audience cut to the chase. "What's being done to get parents to pull out their wallets and buy something on your Web site?" Like a guest at a wine tasting who's only there for the booze, the questioner had crudely brought up a primary purpose of licensed characters, engaging Web sites, and brand building: Sell stuff to kids. A couple of guys on the panel mumbled some platitudes about the perils of commercialism for kids, but Zeiler charged in unbowed. "How do you engage a parent?" he asked. "If a kid is having a temper tantrum in a store. If the kid is so enamored of the product that he has to have it."

The session soon wrapped up, and I approached the goateed Zeiler to ask him about his comment. What did he say to the critics who believe that toy companies shouldn't purposefully set off the tantrum-inducing misery in kids that invariably pits children against their parents? Zeiler channeled his inner Ayn Rand and gave it to me straight: "If a kid in a store says 'This is really cool,' if it generates sales, who are we to dictate? That's the parent's job."

And keeping kids away from the marketing machine is going to become harder. Game systems can eat up even more hours than Web gaming, which is why advertisers spent $80 million on ads nested within video games in 2007, and in the next four years are expected to spend more than 10 times that amount having snacks, drinks, and shoes written into software. (Both Sony and Microsoft have recently moved the sale of video-game ads in-house.) Avatar Web sites such as Neopets, BarbieGirls, and Be-Bratz are expected to sell $150 million worth of ads each year by 2012, and have already become places to train kids how to shop. The latest trend in screen-based marketing is to complement a Web-centered kid world with that of the screens that never leave children's sides: those on cell phones. Disney recently established a Web-based destination for kids known as Pixie Hollow, a virtual friendship where subscribing girls can adopt fairy avatars and then use their cell phones to digitally feed Pixie Hollow butterflies. With a study having already been conducted by the Sesame Workshop to have Elmo texting off a letter of the day, kids will soon become adept at checking their cell phones long before reaching kindergarten.

The High Cost of Marketing
Selling to kids has been recognized as treachery since the 1970s, simply because using moving images and blinking lights to get grade schoolers thinking about toys, food, and TV shows is like hunting cattle with rocket launchers. It's why you can't advertise to kids in Norway and Sweden, and why Canada, Greece, and some other European countries have severe restrictions. Kids today may seem more media savvy than they did in the past, but their familiarity with brands only masks the immaturity of their young brains. "Developmentally, children under the age of 7 or 8 are incapable of discerning persuasive intent," says Dr. Rich. "They really believe that Reese's Peanut Butter Cups cereal is nutritious. As a result, the American Psychological Association has stated it is unethical to advertise to children under 8."

Researchers have learned that marketing is bad for kids on nearly every measure of well-being. Children's TV ads, Web sites, and video games are dominated by pitches for candy, soda, and fast food to the tune of $10 billion to $15 billion annually, and research shows that these ads work: Kids as young as 2 ask for foods they've seen advertised on TV. Even after adjusting for age, BMI, total energy intake, TV viewing, and physical activity, for every hour of TV or video viewing, adolescents' odds of eating foods commonly advertised on television increased, according to a 2006 study from the Harvard School of Public Health. "Statistically, there is strong evidence that exposure to television advertising is associated with [obesity] in children ages 2 to 11, and teens ages 12 to 18," concluded a recent National Academy of Sciences report titled "Food Marketing to Children and Youth: Threat or Opportunity?"

Marketing also does a number on girls. The American Psychological Association recently convened a task force that found that the proliferation of sexualized images of girls in advertising, merchandising, and the media is causing real problems. "We have ample evidence to conclude that sexualization has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive function, physical and mental health, and healthy sexual development," states Eileen L. Zurbriggen, PhD, coauthor of the task force's report and a professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The rapid metastasizing of screen-based marketing and licensing has insidious consequences for all children, and it goes beyond obesity and body-image issues. Start with licensing. For very young children, cartoon characters have become ads in and of themselves--marketers have successfully trained kids to play with brands, not toys--and researchers are just starting to understand why this is scary. Children need generic, unbranded toys in order to best express themselves, explains Susan Linn, EdD, head of the influential Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood and author of The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World. A psychologist who once worked for Fred Rogers and is a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, Linn laments the fact that it's hard to find any products for kids--from food to toys--that aren't adorned by brand logos. On the surface, the danger is that it's stifling children's imaginations. "Any engaging, unbranded puppet will encourage self-expression," says Linn, "while a Cookie Monster puppet is always Cookie Monster and does little more than eat cookies." But the issue is bigger than creativity. "What's at risk," says Linn, "is no less than the development of essential life skills, the ability for children to look to themselves for generating amusement and to soothe themselves when they feel stressed."

Children would be less vulnerable to licensing were it not for the all-consuming role of screen media in their lives. Today's kids, from the ages of 8 to 18, spend "the equivalent of a full-time job, with a few extra hours thrown in for overtime (44.5 hours a week)" using the media, according to a 2005 Kaiser study titled "Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds." It starts earlier than ever. The independent use of screens by kids now precedes that of toilet paper. Before they are 2 years old, 38 percent of kids can turn on the TV and 40 percent can change channels, according to another Kaiser report, "The Media Family: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, Preschoolers, and Their Parents." By the time they are 4 years old, 69 percent of kids can put in a DVD and 71 percent can operate the remote control; by age 6, a third have TVs in their bedrooms, and by adolescence, that figure doubles.

"To me, consumerism is the more insidious problem," says Tim Kasser, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and author of The High Price of Materialism. "It's less obviously seen. It's the water in which we swim." Scientific studies show an association between materialism in children and impairment on a host of markers of children's physical, social, and psychological well-being. "Children who are high on scales of materialism report being less happy, less satisfied with life, more depressed, and more anxious. They even have lower self-esteem," he says. "One report even shows more somatic problems such as headaches and stomachaches." Kasser cites a correlation between materialism and both oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder. Materialistic kids also don't make good stewards of the environment. "A study measured kids' materialistic tendencies in relation to 10 behaviors that help the environment," says Kasser. Surprise, surprise: "Materialistic kids were less likely to engage in positive environmental behavior."

Recently, economist Juliet B. Schor, PhD, published groundbreaking research on consumerism, media use, and well-being among 300 fifth and sixth graders in the Boston area, one of the first studies of consumerism in children this age. The data connected the dots between television watching and increased consumerism in kids. Schor, author of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, found that both screen time and high consumer involvement were significant causes of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, psychosomatic complaints, and increased conflicts with parents. The study specifically found that consumerism and screen time led to mental-health problems, rather than the other way around. It wasn't clear how this entire stew of misery came about--whether consumerism made kids envious of others, or cut into time for exercise, or dampened fantasy lives--only that the end result of too much media and consumer involvement in a child is a worsening of nearly every measure of wellness and family harmony.

A Parent's Guide to a Branded World
Sometimes it feels like a lost cause, like my 4-year-old is under siege and the goateed guys doing this to her can get away with it by telling themselves "the parents are in charge." So with the help of the researchers, physicians, and educators I interviewed for this story, I've created some rules for anti–child marketing jujitsu, guidelines parents can use to delay the moment when their child's imagination quits thinking about ponies and replaces it with My Little Pony (see How to Stick It to SpongeBob & Co.).

It's a constant battle. While visiting friends recently, a mother started in on my little girl because she didn't know about Hannah Montana. Buying groceries, we push our cart past Dora dolls next to the jelly, Barbies near the chips, Hannah Montana DVDs in the cereal aisle, and a TV airing a loop of the High School Musical kids singing and selling Sara Lee bread. A trip to Toys "R" Us is like peeling back my daughter's scalp, and then ladling a hot porridge of branding into her skull.

I don't want Parker to grow up without any cultural references, so I've been picking my battles. We avoid the mac-and-cheese boxes imprinted with a Disney music star, but we have cans of SpaghettiOs featuring Disney princesses. I let her watch whatever she wants at Grandpa's house. He recently thought it would be funny to tell her to tell me she likes Hannah Montana, but she told him she didn't. Maybe we're gaining ground. Then again, maybe not.

Taking Kasser's advice, when Parker one day pressed us for a Dora hat and sunglasses, even though she has plenty of hats and sunglasses, we tried the straight talk.

"You're going to grow out of Dora," my wife said.

"Do you know what Dora is?" I added. "Dora is marketing."

My daughter listened, thought about what we had said, and then leaped up into the air with joy. "Dora is marketing!" she cried. "I want a Dora hat and sunglasses so I can grow out of it!"

Fun House Essentials
How to Stick It to SpongeBob & Co.