Congratulations to the Federal Trade Commission for taking on advertising literacy for kids. They’ve recently introduced an online game, Admongo, to help kids better navigate their commercialized world. While playing the game, kids must closely examine fictional ads: Who is responsible for the ad? What is the ad actually saying? What does the ad want me to do?

Associated resources and a curriculum for grades 5 and 6 are available through Scholastic. (The Scholastic site for parents is coming soon!)

The FTC previously introduced You are Here, a site that also teachers kids about marketing and advertising but  includes lessons on business practices and other topics.

I fully support media literacy, of course. But I can’t help but wonder: What is being done to stop the worst of the worst marketing in the first place?

Commercials Are the Culprit in TV-Obesity Link
Yale Study Finds More Licensed Characters and Other Packaging Promotions Used to Market Less Nutritious Foods to Kids
A Fine Line when Ads and Children Mix
Junk food gets spotlight in many movies: study
BK Kids Meals – Minneapolis’ Campbell Mithun’s Junk Food Client
U-M Researcher Says Preschoolers Understand the Power of Advertising

Just asking.

Over at Mom-101 is a great round-up (in the comments) of what real parents are doing to teach their kids about marketing. I think even Mom-101, a former writer of commercials, would support PEM’s tenets:

– Ethical marketing targets only consumers who can perceive and understand the persuasive tactics in commercials.
– Ethical marketing promotes products that are not harmful to children.
– Ethical marketing supports strong families by respecting parental authority in the parent-child relationship.

Understanding children’s developmental stages is the foundation for marketing directed at kids.

Via Derek Baird, here’s a slide show created by Dan Pankraz, an Australian “youth planning specialist.” Keep in mind that I’m not picking on Mr. Pankraz in particular. This is just an example of how marketers go about trying to influence your children.

In summary, a marketer’s job is to:

– Help young children feel imaginative, clever, understood, connected, and valued;
– Help “tweens” feel self-confident and proud; and
– Help teens feel independent.

Excuse me, but isn’t that my job?

The lie in all this, the lie that can lead to family stress, depression and low self-esteem, is that children will not really feel understood, self-confident or independent by buying something.

This is exploitation for profit — pure and simple. And how youth marketers can continue to use kids’ developmental deficiencies to make money is beyond me.

Remember, kids are not little adults. They do not understand the intention of commercial messages the way we do.

Talk to your kids. Constantly. Because marketers do.

New resource for kids, parents and teachers: Admongo.gov, the FTC’s advertising literacy site

Announcing my new gig at Change.org where I’ll be writing about all things education. For my initial post I played it pretty safe and wrote what I knew: Corporate Advertising: Not the Solution to Funding Woes.

If you’re not familiar with Change.org, please take a moment to check it out. It’s a unique site highlighting specific social and environmental causes using informative blogs and petitions. There’s a fundraising component (in fact, I chose Change.org to host PEM’s fundraising well over a year ago). Plus it’s a social networking site. And it’s ad-free!

I am thrilled to be part of the Change.org team and hope you’ll stop by often. Be sure to drop me a line if there’s an education issue you’d like to see covered.

Seems that Ooh, La La! Couture, the clothing designers for Miley Cyrus’s nine-year-old sister Noah and her friend, eight-year-old actress Emily Grace Reaves, is not really designing children’s lingerie, just tutus attached to tank tops. As of this writing the Ooh, La La website was down and all the online videos showing the girls modeling some designs had been designated private. If you haven’t seen them yet, here are some of the images of these girls and their outfits.

Seeing young girls dressing like stereotypical streetwalkers has been disturbing people all over the internet the last few days, which is good. This problem is real. And big. And it goes beyond wondering what these girls’ parents are thinking.

It is a parenting issue. But it’s also a feminist issue. And a public health issue. And a corporate marketing issue.

Hardy Girls Healthy Women posts about the new American Apparel campaign, which asks women and young girls older than 18 to send in photos of their bottoms for judging on the internet:

The sexualization of women and porn-inspired media have infiltrated the everyday culture of the youngest girls. According to the 2007 APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls in Media, the negative impact on girls and women is indisputable: the sexualization and objectification of girls and women in media wreak havoc on our psychological, emotional, cognitive and relational lives.

[American Apparel's] campaign is a perfect example of the insidious ways marketers and media promote sexualization and body obsession as “girl power.” American Apparel is directly and unconscionably undermining girls’ healthy development by equating confidence with looking sexy, winning with being judged on their appearance, and personal value with 15 seconds of fame. The objectification of girls’ and women’s bodies is a real concern in a country where 1 in 4 women is a victim of violence, and sexual harassment is rampant.

(Sign their petition boycotting American Apparel.)

Or spend some time at Sociological Images and discover sexually suggestive teen brands, baby booties, “future trophy wife” kids’ tee, House of Dereón’s girls’ collection, sexualized clothes and toys, sexist kids’ tees, a trifecta of sexualizing girls, a zebra-striped string bikini for infants, icky kids’ t-shirts, “are you tighter than a 5th grader?” t-shirt, and the “I’m tight like spandex” girls’ t-shirt.

I also wrote a post in 2008 about Disney’s Miley Cyrus and and her leap into sexualization with the photo shoot for Vanity Fair. I’ll leave you with the images (and helpful resources follow):
Read the rest of this entry »

Two recent reads have triggered flashbacks to the world in which corporations will do anything to sell, sell, sell.

From Ph.D. in Parenting, one of my new favorite blogs, comes the Child’s Hierarchy of Needs (and the followup, Intersecting Needs: Maslow, interdependence, parenting, caregiving, relationships).

Sadly, this reminded me of how marketers use Maslow to pinpoint weaknesses in children’s developmental stages to create more effective marketing.

I first ran into this concept when reading The Great Tween Buying Machine: Capturing Your Share of the Multi-Billion-Dollar Tween Market.

No longer children and not quite teenagers, tweens – kids aged 8 to 12 years – are one of the fastest growing market segments for corporate America. With significant influence on household and family purchases, the four key motivating drivers for tweens are fun, freedom, power, and belonging. The Great Tween Buying Machine will demystify the newly discovered tween market using research findings and by discussing product development techniques and the latest marketing strategies in packaging, advertising, and promotions.

As one customer review states,

Siegel demonstrates why it is that this “tween” market has become so interesting for businesses: this particular age group is old enough to make suggestions to their parents about how to spend their money but still young enough to be utterly manipulated.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any creepier, Truthout exposes more about the practice of neuromarketing — using medical technology to determine your brain’s reactions to various commercial marketing techniques. I guess the kid’s version of this would be whatever goes on at the Disney Advertising Research Lab.

I find these standard practices wholly unethical when applied to children. You?

Disney and their now-disastrous Baby Einstein venture are back in the news as parents in California pursue a class-action lawsuit claiming a violation of the the California Consumers Legal Remedies Act.

The lawsuit (pdf) states that the recent Baby Einstein refund is not adequate compensation for the false and misleading claims made by Disney while marketing the Baby Einstein products. Instead, plaintiffs say, Disney should:

1. Cover the real cost of the videos, including tax (current refund is for $15.99 per DVD);
2. Extend the refund to purchases made before 2004;
3. Cover shipping and handling to return the DVDs; and
4. Eliminate the 4-refunds-per-household limit.

Seems quite reasonable. Oh! And, it’s the law.

In other Disney news, they’ve banned cadmium in an Disney-branded products after a recent necklace recall. While they’re at it, they might want to check out a few other products from manufacturers that have benefited from the Disney marketing machine, like play yards that could suffocate baby, shoes with choking parts, toy magic wands excessive lead paint, and jammies with handy burn hazards.

After all, they have their reputation to protect.

Image courtesy ChuckHolton

A quick note to pass along some new blogs (well, new to me at least) that you might like:

Nursery Rhymes and Night Lights Parenting and Montessori.
The Millikan Daily Psychology and technology.
Our Suburban Homestead Waldorf and Esty Shop.
Wisdom Pursuit Advice and inspiration.

Dr. Daniel Wheeler was so kind as to share with me his dissertation from his doctoral program at the University of Central Florida titled The Effectiveness of the Dove Evolution Film as a One Shot Media Literacy Treatment.  The purpose of the study was to “test the effectiveness of the Dove Evolution film as a one-shot media literacy treatment to change sociocultural attitudes toward appearance.”

Many of us were skeptical of the award-winning Evolution ad since it became a viral sensation a few years ago (see Girls, pay no attention to the naked supermodel sitting next to you, or, Dove’s at it again).

And as it turns out it really wasn’t effective. At all. From Wheeler:

A modified version of the Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire (SATAQ-3) was administered as a pretest and posttest, measuring four variables such as awareness and internalization of the media ideal, pressure to achieve the media ideal, and desire to be athletic. It was hypothesized that the treatment would raise awareness but lower internalization, pressure and desire to be athletic. Although none of the hypotheses were supported, there were statistically significant changes. Contrary to expectations, the awareness measure decreased and the pressure score increased.

In other words, viewing the film actually increased scores measuring pressure to obtain the media ideal, and the scores measuring internalization — the extent to which one accepts society’s norms of thinness and beauty and modifies behavior to achieve it — remained the same.

Wheeler also comments on the embarrassing truth that corporate giant Unilever owns both Dove and hyper-sexualized Axe (see Dove’s successful marketing cycle, guaranteed: Advertise products, repair damage to girls’ self-esteem. Repeat.):

However, the recognition that Dove Soap is a company subsidiary of a corporation whose other subsidiary, Axe men’s products, use sexual advertising, leads to the conclusion that the purpose of the Dove Evolution film is to make a profit for the company. By appealing to customers who perceive themselves as ordinary-looking women, Dove can sell beauty products to a wider range of customers.

Media literacy, then, has far-reaching applications, including recognizing commercial advertising disguised as a public service.

Emphasis mine. Which is why the Dove Self-Esteem Workshops still rub me the wrong way. If you argue that at least it’s a step in the right direction, I’d suggest that you read Kate Harding’s Body image revolution postponed at Salon.com and remember that, according to Unilever, when girls with self-esteem become adults they’ll need to lighter their skin, get rid of those wrinkles and lose some weight.

So even though the Evolution film didn’t enlighten us enough about the beauty industry, at least it helped sell more product. Which was Dove’s goal in the first place.