Sly marketing creating little consumers

Even before they can talk, children face marketing pressures. Think about diapers: Most have some type of character prominently displayed. By age 3, toddlers can recognize brands and ask for them.

Marketers want our children's eyes and ears — and their dollars. And they're being ever more aggressive about reaching them.

Critics worry about the growing pressure on kids to buy and affiliate themselves with particular brands. They say parents need to vaccinate their kids against changing tactics in marketing and advertising.

The Minneapolis-based National Institute on Media and the Family has launched an ongoing investigation into whether some marketers are exploiting children. "Not only are they advertising to kids, they're using minors to promote their products to unsuspecting peers," said David Walsh, a former high school counselor and the institute's founder and president.

The institute is also examining its belief that some marketers are exposing minors to adult-oriented concepts and creating forums that make children easy targets for predators, he said.

"Kids and teens are the epicenter of American consumer culture," writes Juliet Schor in her book, "Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture." "Yet few adults recognize the magnitude of this shift and its consequences for the futures of our children and of our culture."

THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE

These days, interactive Web sites lure kids to play games laced with subtle ads for sweets, or to write slogans that indirectly promote a soft drink.

A popular Web site recruits teens to help shape and promote new movies, music and fashion products and e-mail their friends about them. On another site, girls are invited to plan slumber parties where they test products on their friends. The host can earn free stuff by sharing what her guests think. Using these practices, labeled "participatory marketing," cultivates consumers who help create and define products and are more likely to buy them, marketers believe.

Even more troublesome to marketing critics is "real-person product placement," some companies' practice of giving kids discounts or other perks in exchange for wearing or toting brand-name products in places where other kids will notice.

A "buzz marketing" strategy aims to constantly bombard the consumer. Products show up not only in sponsorships, events and packaging but in cartoons, kids' entertainment centers and songs performed by popular musicians. The new norm is kids and marketers joining to persuade adults to spend money, writes Schor,

"These developments have not been beneficial for children," Schor writes. Her research shows children immersed in consumer culture faring much worse socially and psychologically than others their age.

Also troubling is that children watch TV without parental supervision, Schor said. Marketing has also moved into such parent-free environments as schools and the Internet. Ads leap out in e-mails, instant messaging, chat rooms and blogs and in text messages on cell phones.

And day by day, marketers are becoming bolder.

ACCEPTED NORM

'Advertising is everywhere," echoes Susan Linn, author of "Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Children" (2004, New Press, $24.95 hardcover). A psychiatry instructor at Harvard University and co-founder of a coalition, Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children, she has tracked the rise in marketing to children from the 1970s, when children were discovered as a marketing group. In 1980, Congress took away the Federal Trade Commission's ability to regulate marketing to kids. In 1984, it deregulated children's TV.

The 1980s and '90s brought a huge escalation in marketing to kids that many now consider business as usual.

And kids sell to each other, too. Interactive marketing gives the consumer a role in shaping products and their image. For example, at www.tremor.com, Procter and Gamble recruits teens to develop product ideas and marketing programs that would attract their peers.

An old view of a consumer as a passive recipient is no longer accurate or very useful, writes Michael Solomon, a professor of consumer behavior at Auburn University in Alabama who has written a book geared to marketers. "Advertisers have to be more creative and offer more entertainment value," he said.

ON THEIR SLEEVES

But even Solomon has ethical concerns about some of the new tactics, particularly companies' practice of rewarding kids for wearing or carrying their products without telling their peers what they're doing.

Ifrah Sheikhabdulkadir, 16 and a sophomore at St. Paul's Johnson High School, said she has seen that tactic in action. A friend wearing a popular clothing brand told her he was paid to show it off. If he hadn't told her about the money, his deceptiveness would have bothered her a little. "But not too much," she said.

Her response wouldn't surprise Solomon. "Young people are accepting commercial messages as part of daily life," he said. "They may rebel. But it's just a part of who they are."

Walsh, of the National Institute for Media and the Family, said kids and teens are sought after largely because so many years lie ahead for them as consumers.

"We need to ask well-placed questions to help them deconstruct advertising without sermonizing," he said. "We need to say no to help kids learn lessons of delaying gratification.

"Saying no in a yes culture isn't an easy thing to do."

Kay Harvey can be reached at kharvey@pioneerpress.com. What kids value — the things they own versus the things they do — tends to change over time. Pages 1E, 8-9E