Advertising aimed at kids is playing hide and seek

DAVID SHAW (Los Angeles Times)

March 6, 2005

Apart from cruelty, I can think of few forms of human behavior that enrage me more than hypocrisy.

The advertising and marketing arm of the tobacco industry has long been one of the planet's leading practitioners of hypocrisy, doing everything in its power to sell as many cigarettes as possible to as many people as possible, and then — when proof of tobacco's carcinogenic effects became irrefutable — suddenly insisting, "No, no, we didn't run all those cigarette ads to try to encourage people — and certainly not young people — to start smoking. We just want to persuade those who already smoke to switch to (or stay with) our brand."

Right. That's why R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. used the character Joe Camel in its ads from 1988 until 1997, when public and governmental pressure finally forced the company to eliminate Joe from its commercials.

If ever an ad campaign seemed designed specifically for young people, that was it. But Reynolds spokesmen consistently denied that placing a suave, sophisticated cartoon character in various social settings — among them bars and pool rooms — was an appeal to young, potential smokers (or new smokers of any age).

Of course, by the time Reynolds retired Joe, he had helped increase the brand's market share almost 7%.

Now the folks who market fast food, soft drinks, sugar-loaded breakfast cereals and other comestibles aimed at kids are trying to convince both Congress and the public that, in fact, their ads aren't really effective and that kids would eat just as much of those foods and be just as fat if there were no ads.

Advertising agencies usually devote enormous manpower to proving to their clients that their ads do work, that the $278-billion-a-year advertising industry is effective and that their ads in particular are persuasive builders of market share and thus worth the extravagant fees their clients pay them.

Advertising is effective. Just look at how many jingles and slogans have stuck in our collective consciousness — "You deserve a break today" (McDonald's), "Ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent pure" (Ivory soap), "The ultimate driving machine" (BMW), "You got it, Toyota," "Fly the friendly skies of United," "Please don't squeeze the Charmin," "At General Electric, progress is our most important product." (That last one was so successful that it helped launch the B movie actor who uttered it thousands of times on television into the White House.)

Maintaining momentum

I remember reading an interview years ago with P.K. Wrigley, son of the founder of the chewing gum empire, in which the reporter — then riding on a train with Wrigley — asked him why his company still spent so much money on advertising despite such enormous success and a near-universal name recognition that would seem to render advertising an unnecessary and redundant expenditure. I no longer recall the exact wording of Wrigley's answer, but it was something like: Because if we stopped advertising, the same thing would happen to our sales that would happen to this train if the engine fell out.

Flash forward to 2005 and suddenly — in an environment far more saturated with advertising than anything Wrigley could possibly have envisioned — we actually have advertising executives arguing that what they spend their lives (and their clients' ad budgets) doing is not effective.

With public health officials increasingly concerned about the growing obesity rate among children, ad agencies and the companies they represent are now launching a campaign that would surely make Wrigley laugh — and blush.

The newly formed Alliance for American Advertising is trying to organize more than two dozen food companies and associations to "beat back the public perception that advertising makes children obese," as AdWeek.com recently put it.

Many organizations dedicated to safeguarding the welfare of children have attacked advertising aimed at children in recent years. The Kaiser Family Foundation of Menlo Park, in Northern California, said last year that media aimed at children are "laden with elaborate [ad] campaigns, many of which promote foods such as candy, soda and snacks."

"Numerous studies show that the kids who spend the most time watching TV are the most likely to be obese," Vicki Rideout, director of Kaiser's Program for the Study of Entertainment Media and Health, told me last week, "and it turns out that it's not because they're couch potatoes. Most studies show that kids who watch a lot of TV spend no less time in physical activity than other kids.

"But kids who spend more time watching TV do have a higher caloric intake. One study showed that kids see 40,000 commercials a year…. The bulk of ads on kids' shows are for toys and food, and the number of ads kids see has a definite effect on the requests they make in the grocery store."

Moreover, Rideout says, "It's no longer just television. There's a new type of immersive advertising, websites designed for kids, with activities and games featuring food products so that they're surrounded by food promotions all the time they're playing."

Hiding behind the hype

The American Psychological Assn. insists that all advertising that targets children younger than 8 is unfair and shouldn't be permitted.

I wouldn't go that far. I wouldn't mind seeing bookstores and newspapers, among others, advertise to young children. I don't even object that vigorously to the ads for McDonald's.

What I do object to is the people behind the ads claiming their ads don't do what they're designed to do — persuade the kids who see them to tell their parents they want a Happy Meal at McDonald's.

Next thing you know, the ad agencies responsible for all those beer commercials on televised sporting events will be saying they're not really trying to get sports fans to buy and drink beer.

I can hear them now:

"People don't buy beer because they watch our commercials showing frosty beer bottles and attractive, scantily clad women. They'd buy beer anyway. In fact, we're doing society a favor. The more people who drink beer, the fewer who'll drink hard liquor. Besides, we're just trying to show people the latest swimsuit fashions."

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read his previous "Media Matters" columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.