They use brands to create an identity. Their pockets are full of disposable income. They hang out at the mall. And, most importantly, they lack the critical skills to see through advertising. If 13-year-old shoppers didn't exist, marketers would have to invent them.
Just how attractive are 13-year-olds to marketers?
Enough so to spend big money to find out what they like and what they'll buy. Today's companies hire anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists to study youth, who have the kind of spending power their boomer parents would have dreamed of in the 1950s.
"What's happened in the last decade is marketers recognize that tweens, as early as seven or eight, or in California even four, have money and spend it without their parents," says Alan Middleton, a York University marketing professor who once led the J. Walter Thompson ad agency in Japan.
The average Canadian teen has about $40 a week in disposable income. Why so much? Unlike their boomer parents, teens today have living grandparents to spoil them. They have fewer siblings to share with, due to smaller families. Divorce can give them two sets of parents, all trying to win their love.
Thirteen is a magical time when parents are easing off on supervision.
There is greater opportunity to make independent decisions, more time to be influenced by marketers and peers.
Teens are most likely to buy their own candy, soft drinks, snacks, fast food, cereal, books, toys, recorded music. Parents direct the purchase of electronics, software and personal care products.
This is also an age that is often too young to understand the influence advertising is having on them. These are, after all, kids, not little adults.
Even marketing experts admit 13-year-olds aren't equipped for the adult marketplace. Middleton says 13-year-olds are less able than adults to delay gratification. They have more instant, visceral reactions to brands.
They are more driven by peer respect.
The biggest challenge is how to reach them. Traditional TV ads are old news since kids are spending more time online and less time with television. So advertising has had to become more savvy and subversive. While billboards and direct TV ads still exist, a great many have turned to subtle methods that blanket teenage lives.
Ads for teens now lie in online contests sponsored by companies selling products. Trendy websites or gadgets are branded to quietly get that name in front of the teen consumer.
Take the popular chat site ICQ.com. Advertising agency 24/7 Canada, which sells ads for several top teen websites, claims to reach half of all online Canadians aged 12 to 24 by selling ads on sites like ICQ.com. It's done by selling more than those banner ads one sees blaring out of many websites.
There are more subtle, all-encompassing means.
For example, McDonald's bought the skin or web structure for ICQ.com so users can download a version sponsored by the golden arches.
It's a popular method of reaching teens. Virgin Mobile has done something similar with "site takeovers" on kids' sites like Nexopia.com, which has more than 300,000 registered Canadian users with an average age of 17.
Here's another, equally subtle way of advertising to teens. MuchMusic.com offers a long list of youth-oriented contests on its site. They are all sponsored by companies that kids would easily recognize in their consumer lives -- Jolly Rancher, Nintendo, Paper Mate, Dentyne and Alesse.
So teens are no longer getting just the in-your-face advertising. It's more pervasive.
Ads are now the "wallpaper" of kids' lives, says Jane Tallim, director of education at the Media Awareness Network, a nonprofit organization that provides media-savvy resources for parents and teachers.
And the audience is there when it comes to online efforts. There are roughly 19 million Canadians online and 7.1 per cent of them are aged nine to 12, according to web-tracking firm comScore Media Metrix.
That's a wired preteen community of 1.4 million.
A 2004 Ping survey on youth trends from research firm Youthography reveals tween girls are online about 20 hours a week for radio, entertainment, school and chatting with friends. Youth Culture Group, another research firm and magazine publisher, says 81 per cent of youth are instant messaging.
Is it all working?
In Burlington, Rae Ramsay says her 13-year-old son, Travis Welowszky, insisted he couldn't get just any MP3 player when they decided to get him a gift for high Grade 8 marks. It had to be the Apple iPod.
"The Apple is the preferred one at this point ... he's quite the little consumer, as they all are," said Ramsay. "It's peer pressure to an extent and we want them to be comfortable, but they almost feel an entitlement to this neat stuff."
Travis, a Grade 9 student at Assumption Catholic Secondary School, says Apple has ads that connect well with teens: trendy dancers, great music, flashy colours and the unmistakable white headphones making it all happen.
"But it's also a legal way of downloading because it comes with iTunes (Apple's music software)," says Travis, noting the device is functional and cool at the same time. "I see everybody at school with them."
Advertising agencies have been studying youth for decades. What's new is the low age -- university students were once considered young -- and the methods employed.
Surveys were once the primary if not sole tool. Now ethnography -- the monitoring of one group's habits -- is routine.
Teenage Research Unlimited was a pioneer in 1982. It was the first marketing research firm to specialize in teens. TRU boasts it has interviewed 500,000 teens, using ethnographic tactics and focus groups. They've done work for Coca-Cola, Chips Ahoy, Doritos, Dr. Pepper, Oreos, Reebok and Sony.
Toronto research firms Youthography and the Youth Culture Group are also talking to teens, going to clubs, boasting of how in-touch their young employees are and selling the results to clients.
One of the new frontiers is neuromarketing, which scans the brain using MRIs to see, for example, how a preference for Coke or Pepsi might appear in the brain.
Or another might monitor where teens' eyes turn first in retail stores.
But the rush to get data has some in the marketing industry questioning the quality of data coming out on young teens.
This is big business. The Canadian teen market is worth $1.8 billion. Companies can't afford a major mistake for fear of embarrassment or completely missing a trend.
Such was the case when Levi Strauss and Co. lost a huge market share by missing the wide-leg jean trend in the 1990s or when McDonald's launched its online "I'd hit it'' campaign, prompting derision from online kids' chat rooms in that it implied having sex with a burger.
Hence, consumer psychologists are jumping on board to help marketers get it right.
But who is the watchdog in all this attention being flourished on young teens?
When it comes to marketing on tech toys and the web, Advertising Standards Canada, the industry's self-regulatory body, doesn't preapprove ads as it does for radio and TV.
A complaint can prompt the ASC to measure kid-oriented web ads against The Broadcast Code for Advertising to Children, which defines kids as those under 12.
The American Psychological Association convened a task force of PhDs to tackle the topic and they published a lengthy 2004 report on the psychological issues around the "increasing commercialization of childhood."
While they called for a public policy response, not professional standards, the APA did adopt the task force's recommendations, among them researching what is new and what is different in advertising targeted to children and teens, as well as investigating how advertising in new interactive media environments, such as the Internet, influences children.
Juli Kramer is the 2005 winner of the American Psychological Association's award for best ethics paper. The title: Ethical Analysis and Recommended Action in Response to the Dangers Associated with Youth Consumerism.
She worries that media literacy, which often studies traditional ad forms, might miss broad psychological issues. How does an ad play on insecurity? How do colours and symbols tap into something deep within us? Can we consciously resist ads designed by neuropsychologists?
"It's very powerful," says Kramer, a mother of two.
"It's kind of scary, I think."
Hamilton student and part-time grass cutter Alex Hill, 13, said the gaming, IMing and product research sites he visits often bombard him with ads.
"It's really annoying, you're always trying to get rid of them," said Alex, who brings in $30 a week from work. He'd love a cellphone, but already has an iPod Mini, which he claims is better than a typical MP3 player due to its storage and gaming abilities.
He says the best ads, like those from phone company Vonage, use humour.
Alex is online every day after school, mostly chatting with friends or gaming online.
But the influence of advertising isn't limited to online sites. Magazines and peers play a large role for 13-year-olds and they don't have to be magazines traditionally considered to be for 13-year-olds. After all, this is a group that, market research suggests, aspires to be five years older than they are, are no longer interested in toys and are influenced by trendsetters -- the kind of person most sought after by marketers.
"If I see a list in a magazine about what's hot and what's not, I want what's on the hot list," says Dalewood Grade 8 student Hilary Shoreman.
She reads Elle Girl, Seventeen and Teen People. She grew out of the tweeny J-14.
"Everyone wants the same thing, mostly American Eagle."
She likes the chain in Lime Ridge Mall known for its rumpled collegiate-surfer look. She prefers pricier American Eagle jeans over less expensive Stitches denim.
Hilary no longer gets an allowance, which was $10 a week, but instead asks for money when she needs it. She's had a cellphone since around Christmas and stores her friends' contact details inside.
Fellow Dalewood student, 13-year-old Melissa Major, said she's most influenced by what she sees in Seventeen magazine, in the mall or, like Hilary, in American Eagle.
"Or we see it at school when other kids are wearing it," she says.
"We know our brands, so if someone comes to school we know where they got it because we all buy the same things. If someone buys something bad, someone will say something, but we try to keep it to ourselves ... they usually pretend they don't care but they probably do."
rfaulkner@thespec.com 905-526-2468 @13
Too old to be babysat, too young to work. Thirteen is an exciting, frightening age of transition. The Spectator takes a look @13 in a six-part series. We'll talk about fears, joys, relationships, brain and body changes and the intense attention paid by marketers, wrapped up next Monday with a panel discussion by 13-year-olds to see how close we came to the mark. Check out The Spectator website for all the articles. Go to www.thespec.com and click on the @13 logo.
Recommendations into advertising aimed at children suggest more policing
The American Psychological Association's Task Force on Advertising and Children proposed the following research and policy recommendations -- which have now been adopted as APA policy -- to help counter the potential negative effects of ads aimed at children:
* Restrict television advertising as well as advertising in the schools directed to children eight years old and younger.
* Use advertising disclaimers for children's programs in language that children can easily understand.
* Research what is new and what is different in advertising targeted to children and teens.
* Investigate how advertising in new interactive media environments, such as the Internet, influences children.
* Study the persuasive intent of television advertising targeted to children older than eight.
* Examine whether understanding advertising's persuasive intent and its effects differ among genders, races, ethnicities and cultures.
* Develop curriculum for different grade levels to help children understand advertising.
* Educate parents and professionals who work with children and youth on the effects of advertising.
* Support continuing-education programs for psychologists on media literacy, in particular on media advertising and marketing to children.
* Weigh the ethical implications of using psychological research to effectively promote products to children.
* Encourage more rigorous industry self-regulation, such as publicizing to parents guidelines of the Children's Advertising Review Unit of the Council of Better Business Bureaus.
* Investigate the impact of advertising and commercialism in the schools.
* Collaborate with other professional and educational organizations to raise public, professional and political awareness of the increased commercialization of schools.
Series
Photo: Ron Albertson, the Hamilton Spectator /
New teenagers turn to the Internet and magazines
to become product savvy, but conformity and the
influence of their peers are strong determinants
of what they buy with more cash than their parents ever had.
Photo