the Scott Stein

Check out Commerce Not Good For Children at Atlas Blogged about a recent NPR article. I agree that it isn't a tragedy that my son recognizes logos and brands. It means he's discovering and understanding the world around him. And I don't worry that he will become a slave to the marketing departments of cereal and toy companies. As Wulf says:

I don’t really care if my children are watching commercials. I am one of those parents who are capable of saying "no" to my children. And my kids don’t have money, and they don’t have cars, so they won’t be making any purchases for themselves for quite some time. In the meantime, they learn by example. I do not feed them crap, and I do not buy them whatever they ask for. My shopping habits are shockingly similar to those of my parents when I was a child, and shockingly dissimilar to what I was asking for when I was five years old. Despite all of the Smurf-watching I did as a kid, I turned out okay. And that wasn't nearly as educational as Dora, or my personal favorite, Little Einsteins.

The generic, predictable stance of too many in academia and public advocacy (you know, those groups always telling us how terrible things are) seems to be that we are powerless before the lure of commercials and marketing campaigns, or our children are, and we are, as an extension of our children, since our children tell us what to do. (I don't remember ever telling my parents what to do when I was a kid--or, more correctly, I don't remember them listening when I did.)

Corporations and advertising agencies wish that they had the power the experts say they do. Most of the time they're deperately trying to identify whatever is popular and get in on the action. There are so many failed movies, books, products of every sort, that had massive marketing budgets and experts pushing them. When the public doesn't want a product, there isn't much companies can do. Of course, a good ad campaign certainly can bring a product the notice it needs to catch on, and can be the reason one product becomes popular while another fails to win any customers. If advertising didn't work, companies wouldn't spend so much on it. But in the Internet age, what is in is usually the result of word-of-mouth and decentralized customer-to-customer marketing (maybe this has always been the case). The best most companies can do is continue to create products they hope will become the next big thing, or, more often, hope that they've jumped on the emerging bandwagon in time, and hope their advertising helps.

People are far more media savvy than the experts claim. The experts, of course, don't usually think the media has undue influence on themselves. But that's because of the experts' superior educations and sophistication. Unfortunately for the experts, years of college and especially graduate school don't usually make people immune to bullshit; they usually just convince them of a particular brand of it.

I am speaking above about my general sense of the experts' attitudes toward media and marketing and the malleability of the masses. To be fair, the NPR article focuses on children, and it is true that we shouldn't expect them to be as savvy as adults are. Which is why they have parents. The NPR expert, Susan Linn, author of Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood, acknowledges this when she writes, "I don't absolve parents of responsibility for their children's well being in a commercially driven world..." Even in that sentence she backs away from the acknowledgement, by continuing, "...but most of the parents I talk to are doing their best in what often feels like an unending and overwhelming struggle. In the face of well-funded, brilliantly strategized, and relentless commercial assaults on their children, parents are expected to be unyielding gatekeepers and their children's sole protectors." I don't know what parents Linn has talked to. I have a four-year-old and know lots of other parents who have young children. We talk about parenting challenges all of the time. Marketing is never one of them. I have addressed the "brilliantly strategized" claim above, and if you think "assaults" is hyperbolic, Linn also writes:

As I listen to parents and think about my own experiences, I am reminded of a conversation I had with a colleague of mine who works with families in a neighborhood saturated with gangs. He talked about the anguish of parents who find that -- despite their best efforts -- they can't compete with the seductive offerings of a toxic street culture. The culture of marketing that pervades all our communities, from the poorest to the richest, is similar in that it competes with parental values for children's hearts, minds, and souls.

And:

After years of exploring advertising and advertising practices as they affect children, I've come to the conclusion that telling parents to "just say no" to every marketing-related request that they feel is unsafe, unaffordable, unreasonable, or contrary to family values is about as simplistic as telling a drug addict to "just say no" to drugs.

These quotes read like a parody of NPR, but they're real. If NPR listeners agree with them, I suggest that over the years they've been exposed to a bit too much reporting, umm, advertising, umm, manipulation, umm, propaganda, not from corporations or advertisers, but from experts like Linn and NPR. Gangs? Drug addiction? Really? Only people whose children are not facing these challenges would make the comparison.

My son has probably never seen a television commercial for ice cream, but he has eaten ice cream because we sometimes buy it for him. Guess what? He sometimes whines for ice cream. It's what kids do. If I thought whining would get me ice cream, I'd whine for it, too. (It doesn't work for my son and in fact ice cream has been a useful tool in getting him to whine less--but don't tell the obesity police). My son had never seen the cartoon Scooby Doo, but his older cousin had, and last Halloween my son wanted to be Scooby Doo. He had to be something--why I should I care if it's Scooby Doo? My son does sometimes ask for products that have characters on them. Sometimes he gets them, sometimes he doesn't. I like books with certain authors' names on them and CDs with certain musicians' names on them. Sometimes I get them, sometimes I don't.

If liking his Tigger toothbrush makes my son more eager to brush his own teeth (it did) and if liking his Thomas underwear makes him more eager to use the potty and give up diapers (it did), I consider it money well spent, and the good people who made these products available deserve my heartfelt thanks. Other products are less appealing, and as a parent I sometimes have to say "no," which is not only simplistic, as Linn writes, but leaves a burning hole in my heart that might never heal. Still, one thing I'd never do is compare the marketing department selling Tigger toothbrushes to gangs and heroin dealers. But I guess that's why I'm not on NPR.