The Hand That Rocks the Remote

This whole FTC-condemns-entertainment-marketing stink has me worried. But not like you might expect.

I’m worried that my kids have been too sheltered from marketing.

I confess: I’m a PBS mom. My kids don’t watch commercial TV, and even PBS viewing is limited to about three hours a week. I take a lot of grief about this (not the least of it from my colleagues here at PROMO), but I like the way it has worked out. My daughter knows the Boxcar Children, and Ramona the Pest, and Harry Potter (intimately). She sculpts, she plays basketball, she writes plays. My son sings, and drums, and memorizes phone numbers for fun. Pikachu was a long time coming to my house, and when he got here, we just shrugged our shoulders.

But now that my kids are in school, we’re catching snippets of pop culture at home. Jaime sang a scrap of some Britney Spears song often enough in the car that Andrew picked it up as: “Oops! I did it again, breakin’ your heart … I’m not so Millicent.” (Which, if you think about it, Britney Spears isn’t.)

With school friends looming large as major influences on their days and their self-image, I worry that my kids might be culturally illiterate. Do they know enough to hold their own on the playground? Will they be embarrassed by not knowing what Skechers are, the way I was when I thought Redbook was a dirty magazine after some snotty girl asked me in fifth grade if my mom subscribed.

Most importantly: Are my kids savvy enough about media and marketing to be discriminating consumers?

I volunteered last spring to teach a class in advertising at my daughter’s school. I had it all figured out: I’d show the innocent lambs how ads work, how they build desire, and how to tell them apart from programming. We’d spend the first few sessions just watching TV commercials and poring over print ads, and then we’d make our own.

But the fourth graders blew me away. Discussing a sweepstakes spot giving away a Toys “R” Us shopping spree: “Only one kid can win that. There’s, like, zero chance to win.” An image ad for soup: “They put marbles in the bottom of the bowl, you know.” An animated Ronald McDonald: “What do they think we are, babies?” (Here we talked about media placement, to which one girl added: “There are a lot of car ads in National Geographic.”)

These kids were junior cynics, wise to marketers’ wiles, unwilling to fall for mere wish-mongering. My daughter – who, at five, famously declared that her 15-year-old cousin could find “television with commercials!” as if by strong magic – could be eaten alive in a crowd like this.

I want her to know about the marbles in the soup bowl, too.

So we start slowly. I put Jaime on speaker phone when I call American Girl to complain about something she ordered that broke. We ship it back for an exchange together. We watch the Olympics and she asks why they keep breaking into the sports for a Burger King ad. I explain that advertisers give the TV network a lot of money to show those ads to people like us. Does she know why? She stares at the screen. “To make us hungry,” she says.

Then, during men’s gymnastics, I’m horrified to see a masked attacker with a chainsaw chase a woman through the woods, which is Nike’s idea of promoting the health benefits of regular exercise. I ask Jaime what she thinks of it. “Weird,” she says. My husband and I excoriate Nike and NBC in front of her, and then I boot up my PC and send a scathing e-mail to both. (Two days later, NBC pulled the spot because it received so many complaints.)

The next day, we hear a National Public Radio report on the FTC’s condemnation of entertainment marketing that targets kids with violent or sexually explicit fare. NPR quotes psychologists saying that kids are bombarded with marketing, that parents can’t shield them from it all – that our culture, in essence, is papered with marketing and kids see as much as adults, like it or not.

It makes me all the more anxious to raise conscientious consumers who won’t think that “television with commercials” is a magic they can’t resist. They need to know enough about brands to not be dorks on the playground. But even more, they need to understand branding so they can think and choose for themselves.

So my kids and I will continue our sojourn into this marketplace of a world, hand-in-hand, eyes wide open.

But I still won’t let them drink caffeinated pop.