The Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board will be consider a proposal to allow Lowe’s to put up eight-foot banner ads in some Minneapolis parks in exchange for ”goods and services” provided for park improvements (A New Low(e): Ads Proposed for Minneapolis Parks).

The proposal includes Harrison, Parade, Loring, Hiawatha, Matthews, and Longfellow parks.

Can’t kids have some space free from marketing?

Hiawatha, Matthews, and Longfellow parks are each connected to a public school — that’s why Lowe’s would love to have large banner ads there. It’s prime space with a captive audience that would otherwise not be available to them.

But corporate advertising has no place in public parks.

Lowe’s is also asking for indoor signage:

This area brought to you by

Lowe’s
Let’s Build Something Together

These products and more
are available at Lowe’s.
For store information
and locations, please visit
www.lowes.com.

I understand that a company’s donation deserves some recognition. But why an ad? Why not a simple This area brought to you by Lowe’s? Wouldn’t that give Lowe’s the same credit without turning a public space into a suburban shopping mall?

Although it looks like many of the Commissioners are not supportive, it wouldn’t hurt to send yours a quick note.

Photo courtesy smile4camera.

The American Lung Association is exposing how tobacco companies market to children. And they’d like our help.

Their campaign, Expose Big Tobacco, is collecting photographs of neighborhood tobacco advertisements to “highlight the urgent need [for Congress] to finally hold the tobacco companies accountable for how they make and advertise their deadly products.”

[T]obacco companies prey on teenagers and youth — calling them the “replacement generation” of smokers. And sadly — they have a lot of success: Each day more than 4,000 kids try their first cigarette and 1,100 kids become regular daily smokers.

Now is our chance to expose their bad acts. Your pictures will be used to show Congress how important it is that they finally regulate tobacco products - including how they’re marketed and sold in stores. Currently, tobacco products are one of the only consumer products not regulated by the federal government. That means the tobacco companies can spike nicotine levels to make cigarettes more addictive; claim their products are less harmful — even if they’re not; and add candy and other flavorings to try and hook kids. . . .

So, check out stores selling tobacco products and share the pictures you take of their advertisements with us (Hint: check out convenience stores and gas stations selling tobacco products near schools). The American Lung Association will choose the best photos and highlight them our website.

The best photos will also be posted on the Expose Big Tobacco Facebook page (where you can also see some good examples).

Thanks to PEM member Lisa Pogoff for the heads up on this campaign.

Image courtesy American Lung Association.

A little over a year ago I was talking about my crazy nonprofit idea with Chris Berger from Berger Brands. He had just seen Anne Elizabeth Moore at PUSH 2007, thought she was fantastic and that I would really dig her book, Hey Kidz, Buy This Book: A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People.

Chris was right. A little over a year later and I’m helping promote Moore and her book Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity.

Moore, who will be in Minneapolis to present at the National Conference on Media Reform, will be reading at Arise! Bookstore, 2441 Lyndale Avenue S., on Sunday, June 8, at 7:00 p.m.

She will also discuss her role as executive director of the Anti-Advertising Agency’s Foundation for Freedom.

The mission of the Anti-Advertising Agency Foundation For Freedom is to bring the best and brightest former ad pros together once a year; inspire young people to leave the craft; focus the industry and public at large on the profoundly negative social justice impacts of advertising; inspire problem-solving methods focused on the most important issues facing the real world; and shine a light on the influence the advertising, media, and marketing industries has on dwindling public space, atrophying human relationships, and the destruction of democracy.

The event is free. Invitation also available on Facebook.

Next time Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty should just have the chemical company lobbyists write his vetoes for him.

Pawlenty recently vetoed SF 651 because

prohibitions in the bill [banning flame retardants and certain other chemicals from products sold in Minnesota] are not based on established science, and banning the use of flame retardants in children’s clothing may increase burn injuries to children.

Odd, since Healthy Legacy’s Lindsay Dahl had offered to show Pawlenty peer-reviewed studies. Dahl says he didn’t want to see them.

Oh, and it seems that the flame retardants specified in the bill aren’t the ones used in children’s clothing.

When confronted with the facts, Pawlenty apologized but did not back down from the veto. He seems confused about what all these so-called “scientific” “studies” in “peer-reviewed” “journals” mean.

The governor added that the veto was because “I believe our state agencies should review all available research and make a recommendation. . . .”

Dahl said that the science is well established and broadly accepted by scientific experts. Also, she said, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has found safer alternatives to DECA [flame retardant] that meet fire safety standards and are currently on the market. 

My city council member Cam Gordon has this crazy idea:

A more appropriate model for assessing the advisability of exposing people to these sorts of chemicals is the precautionary principle, which places the burden of proof on those who wish to expose people to these chemicals, not on those who wish to protect the public from them. Under the precautionary principle, the plastics industry would have to provide compelling evidence that phthalates are safe.

Meanwhile, the Consumers Union Action Fund is trying to raise $15,000 by Memorial Day to strengthen their fight against unsafe imports at the federal level.

Toxic Toys Still on the Shelf: Governor Vetoes bill that would eliminate toxic chemicals from consumer products

At least a thousand people found their way to Corporate Babysitter via a mention in Salon.com’s Little Girls Gone Wild, an interview with M. Gigi Durham who wrote The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It.

If you’re having trouble getting your head around the sexualization of girls, this article is a great place to start. The issues – the narrow definition of sexuality, the acceptance of only “perfect” bodies, the expection to be “hot” but not sexual (in the era of abstinence-only sex education and purity balls) — are clear and concise.

I’m anxious to read the book — especially the what we can do about it part.

Need some real-life examples from advertising/marketing? Check out the posts at Sociological Images (like this one) where we found this:

Last week I met with PEM’s web designer and cool dad Trevor from Space2Burn. (Did I mention award-winning? Their site for the Minnesota Energy Challenge won an award at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofit’s Technology and Communications Conference.) Trevor’s the one who found the baby legs/business pants image that we all love so much. We’re going to be making some changes to the PEM site and to the monthly newsletter (sign up here).

A quick look at the IRS Charities & Nonprofits web page (Where is my exemption application?) tells us that they are finally reviewing the 501(c)3 applications they received in January — that’s us! For those keeping score at home, we’re waiting for the magical exemption so that we can began to solicit funding to keep PEM going.

When that exemption comes through, we’re going to join Buy the Change, a cool new (local) tool for buying, selling, and event announcements. Sort of a Craig’s List for do-gooders. Seventy percent of the fees go to the nonprofit of your choice.

In other social networking news, my old friend and former coworker Lee (a sorta bigwig at Yamamoto Moss Mackenzie) encouraged me to become LinkedIn. So I did. With that and Facebook (my page and a page for PEM), I’ve got all the networking I can handle.

Susan Linn, Director of the Campaign for a Commerical-Free Childhood, and Joan Almon from the Alliance for Childhood conducted a workshop on creative play at the CCFC Summit in April.

Linn began the workshop with a simple exercise: she held up three puppets, one at a time, and asked us to write down a) what it was, b) what its name was, and c) something it might say.

The first puppet was really just a white sock over her hand with two eyes attached. The second was similar but also had ears and a mouth. The third was a blue, furry monster we all recognized as Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster.

As you may have guessed, the first puppet elicited a variety of identifications, names, and statements from the participants. The second puppet drew a more limited response. Cookie Monster, of course, was a cookie monster and didn’t say too much beyond “Me want cookie.”

This exercise blew me away in its simplicity and its significance, as does Linn’s new book, The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World.

Linn is a ventriloquist, among other things. She started as a child, performed on the street corners of Boston and eventually moved on to the Smithsonian and even Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.  She eventually used her skills and education to become a puppet therapist at Boston Children’s Hospital.

In addition to being the cofounder and director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Linn is the Associate Director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children’s Center and Instructor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School.

In The Case for Make Believe, Linn does just as she promises: makes a case for childhood play by helping us to understand why it so important for childhood development and making us realize how far away from play we’ve gone:

Play is so fundamental to children’s health and well-being – and so endangered – that the United Nations lists it as a guaranteed right in its Convention of the Rights of the Child. . . . In the United States and other industrialized nations, seduction, not conscription, lures children away from creative play.

Lovable media characters, cutting-edge technology, brightly colored packaging, and well-funded, psychologically savvy marketing strategies combine in coordinated campaigns to capture the hearts, minds and imaginations of children – teaching them to value that which can be bought over their own make believe creations.

Reading the book, I was really struck by the fact that our society does not value creative play. Linn talks about how play has almost been eliminated in schools in favor of government-backed policies that “promote rote learning.”

I asked her, in an email interview, if we should return play to the classroom and how we could do that.

(more…)

Dear Washington Post celebrity/pop culture blogger,

A child can be sexualized.

A child cannot be oversexualized. That implies that some childhood sexualization is okay.

Just as there is no such thing as “child sex charges,” there is no such thing as oversexualization of children.

Thank you.