When did you realize that consumer marketing was affecting your family?
Call for stories: When did you realize that consumer marketing was affecting your family?
I’m looking for stories about those moments when you decided that you’d had enough with the TV commercials, the magazine ads, the billboards, the candy racks, or whatever else got you thinking that your child was a target market.
Comment, or send me an email: lisa (at) parentsforethicalmarketing (dot) org.
photo courtesy simonkoleznik
August 22nd, 2008 at 1:02 am
I’m afraid that was pre-utero for me. That’s right. PRE, not ‘IN’ —when the waiting room was stocked w/formula samples and freebies long before she was even a glimmer in my eye.
Wait…maybe it was pre-marriage…w/all the wedding hype and mega-mania mags about having the ‘perfect family’ and those ‘media moments’ that never worked out quite the same way…
Seriously, though, the first time I got a whiff of the ‘playground posse’ and peer influence of media/marketing had to be in Kindergarten when my tuna-loving tyke turned up her nose at her fare & suddenly started begging for Lunchables and other ‘pouch foods’ that she’d never had before.
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:50 am
This was a pivotal moment for me: http://traceesioux.blogspot.com/2007/04/misogynistic-violence-for-breakfast.html
I got really mad that me, and my children, are constantly subjected to violent images - usually featuring women as the victim of violence - on television commercials - for movies and television shows. I wrote the FCC - they said every network gets to decide what to air on commercials - commercials are not held to any standard whatsoever.
Who made that rule? I say that’s the rule I most want to see changed.
Commercials make people hostages - you aren’t consenting because you’re a captive audience and you don’t know it’s coming so you can’t prevent it with ratings or by flipping the channel. In 30 seconds you see a dead woman floating in the bathtub with revealing clothing on and the camera zooms onto her lifeless face and then her breasts - it’s sexual and it’s violent and you’re trying to bond with your kids over Everybody Loves Raymond or something innocent like that. They’re trying to get you to watch CSI or Law and Order.
They’re right to advertise Law and Order should NOT supersede my right, and my kids’ right, not to be exposed to that image.
It pisses me off and I’m willing to fight over it.