Like Taking Candy From a Baby: How Young Children Interact with Online Environments (pdf), a study released today from Consumer Reports Webwatch and the Mediatech Foundation, found that childrens’ websites are not doing a good enough job disclosing their advertising and marketing tactics to parents.

Parents involved in the study kept video journals which documented families’ frustrations with game websites and virtual worlds that draw kids into games and require a purchase to continue playing, among other things. Watch a few of the videos. I’d be surprised if some of those scenarios haven’t already been played out in your home.

Many online games and virtual worlds violate at least two of PEM’s standards of ethical marketing:

1. They interfere with the parent-child relationship by enticing young children to hand over an email address (and other personal information) without parental permission.

2. They take advantage of a child’s inability to understand that advertisers want their money by making the ads indistinguishable from the game itself.

Aaron Delwiche identifies one of the major problems with kids’ virtual games:

For the most part, so-called “virtual worlds” aimed at youth are little more than paper-doll worlds in which players are encouraged to spend virtual money on their on-line avatars. In almost all of these spaces, the pattern is mind-numbingly familiar: Create avatar. Play games. Earn money. Shop for your avatar. Earn money. Shop for your avatar’s house. Earn money. Shop for your avatar. Earn money. Shop. Work. Shop. Work. Shop. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. The only thing that really differentiates each of these worlds from one another is the quality of the art direction and the intellectual property rights secured by the world’s creators.

The developmental benefits of childhood creative play are lost when the play becomes scripted. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to participate.

Katie L. at the New Media Research Studio at NYU hits on my biggest gripe with virtual worlds:

Although I felt that I had a firm grasp on the way things worked in the WebKinz World, I spent some more time throughout this past week exploring the site in hopes of uncovering more redeeming qualities that could potentially counteract its overwhelming focus on promoting consumer culture. Unfortunately however, all I could find was more evidence that the virtual component of Webkinz functions as a mini-capitalist economy, priming children to think first and foremost about getting more money in order to buy more things.

It feeds into ‘you can never have enough, and the more you have the better it is.’

The game creators have no incentive to make the games better — they want to encourage early consumer habits in order to maintain customers for their advertisers — unless we stop playing. And buying.

To help wean away from the virtual world and game habit, try WolfQuest, created by the Minnesota Zoo and eduweb. No ads, no cost. And no mini-capitalist economy.

photo courtesy Spigoo

The blogosphere is full of discussions about Miley Cyrus and her photos in Vanity Fair. I’m surprised by how many writers find nothing wrong with the photo — but then, they didn’t attend a conference on the sexualization of children recently.

With that in mind, here’s some worth reading: At Girl Media Maven, Nancy Gruver has a  great discussion going in the comments of Who’s the Grown Up Here? and a follow-up post where she discusses what all these sexualized images of girls in the media are doing to our girls. And Blue Milk has some terrific visuals to help explain why some of us have been speaking out on this for a while.

This is the kind of conversation I’m hesitant to join, because I feel so bad for this 15-year-old girl, heart of an entertainment franchise, and the life she has ahead of her.

But, Corporate Babysitter that I am, I have to say that there’s one thing missing from this conversation: Disney. Disney owns Miley Cyrus (as lifestyle brand Hannah Montana) to the tune of one billion dollars.

Now, Disney seems to be upset by the photos:

A Disney spokeswoman, Patti McTeague, faulted Vanity Fair for the photo. “Unfortunately, as the article suggests, a situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines,” she said.

Emphasis mine. Disney would know something about creating situations to manipulate kids in order to sell something.

After all, the Disney Princess machine alone is worth four billion dollars (see Disney Reaches to the Crib to Extend Princess Magic, Wall Street Journal).

Disney is arguably the greatest marketed brand ever.

And for their part in the creation of the Miley Cyrus who appears in Vanity Fair, they should not feign indignation. They should be ashamed.

Q:  What do you get when you schedule a dinner party during TV Turnoff Week?
A:  Two sick girls staying home for the day.

Parenting teaches you nothing if not flexibility. The dinner party will be canceled, we’ll see how the day goes with no TV (usually a treat when someone is sick), and the morning will not be spent writing a planned post.

Instead, I’d like to quickly introduce a new Corporate Babysitter feature: Disney Princess Watch.

The number of licensed character products coming out of Disney is fantastically ridiculous and someday, EVERYTHING YOU BUY WILL HAVE A DISNEY CHARACTER ON IT. Until then, Corporate Babysitter will keep you current with the newest, the most unusual, and the most inexplicable products featuring Disney Princesses and other Disney characters.

Today, the first Disney-branded refrigerated dairy beverage: Disney Little Einsteins Milk.

But as we know, Disney would NEVER imply that their refrigerated dairy beverage would help make your children smarter than, say, anyone else’s refrigerated dairy beverage. That is NOT what they are trying to imply with “Little Einsteins.” No. Of course not. They wouldn’t do that.

From the press release:

“Teaming with Disney provides the opportunity to create healthy products that kids will identify with, while enabling parents to provide a highly nutritional and great-tasting beverage that their children will want to drink,” said Sam Stremick, Director of Sales and Marketing for Stremicks Heritage Foods. “The new Little Einsteins milk line provides parents with an easy option for incorporating nutrients like calcium and DHA into their children’s diets to ensure optimal growth and development.”

Have you ever read such complete bull****? Really? You, Disney and Stremicks, are helping parents by slapping a Disney logo on a carton of milk?

What Mr. Stremick means is that since Disney has mastered the art of a) fooling parents with claims the Einstein products will make smarter babies and b) enticing children to nag for anything Disney, parents will feel okay about giving in to a wailing child in the grocery store screaming “I want Disney milk!”

Disney and Mr. Stremick, guess what? You’re not helping parents.

Read more on the CCFC Summit in my guest post at So Sioux Me.

From my inbox: 

Join Maria Bailey, author of “Marketing to Moms: Getting Your Share of the Trillion Dollar Market” and CEO of BSM Media as she moderates a panel of top mom bloggers and representatives from the most respected blog networks.  Bailey in partnership with the Marketing to Moms Coalition will provide a discussion forum allowing you to hear first-hand how Mom Bloggers want to work with brands, the importance of relationships and how to effectively engage them as your best marketing partner.

Dear BSM Media and Marketing to Moms Coalition:

Thank you for your thoughtful invitation to help me learn about how to engage Mom bloggers as marketing partners.

However, I don’t think that I am your target market for this session. I’m not a marketer.

What I’m trying to do is to help parents raise healthy kids who don’t think that their self-worth is based on what they buy or how they look.

In fact, and this is the funny part, I often write about the tactics used by marketers to reel in and convince parents and kids that should buy products that they really don’t need. Or want. And that aren’t good for the planet.

I think it’s great that you are working to engage bloggers. Perhaps next time you might even invite me to be on your panel.

Or, maybe not.

Sincerely,

Lisa Ray
Mom & Blogger

Some product managers and their creatives were up just a little too late (and possibly smoking just a little too much) reading the latest Four-Year-Old-Girl-Thought-Leader data:

Says here that four-year-old girls love horses.

Yep. And that they love makeup. And princesses.

And tiny little thongs. Heh, heh. And strappy five-inch heels.

Hey! Wait. One. Minute!

Genius! 

I’m waiting for the day when one of them says, Maybe we should give those little girls another option.

“Fashion’s back and it’s got a brand new name… Struts!” 
 
The Struts brand is an attitude and a lifestyle for girls who are on the cutting edge of what’s hot in fashion 
 
Struts combine a girl’s natural fondness of horses and her love for fashion dolls.  
 
Struts will be the new buzz word on the playground - the new word of mouth brand with a sense of hipness - Fashion with a Kick! 

FOUR-YEAR-OLDS, people, do NOT have the attitudes or the lifestyles of adults, are NOT on the cutting edge of what’s hot, are NOT hip, and should NOT be classified as word-of-mouth marketers.

Just writing this post makes me feel like taking a shower. 

Fun details and commentary here, here, here, and here.

A popular response to the Target-snow-angel-ad issue (and to many critiques of advertising) was, “It’s just one ad — what’s wrong with that?”

Here’s an answer. This is about subliminal advertising, but works for any image we pass by every day.

If you didn’t find the Target ad offensive, think about advertising images that are. How do these enter our consciousness? And what happens to them there?

And what about product images?

Then, think about those images entering a child’s underdeveloped brain.

This is seven minutes long, which is quite a bit for blog readers, I know, but watch:

(via iamjoshbrown via dawudmiracle)

Nicole Green, a marketing student at the University of Cincinnati, has graciously allowed me to reprint an opinion piece she wrote for The News Record.

An old boss of mine shared with me an anecdote about her young nephew. The boy had overheard his parents arguing over finances, and naturally he wanted them to stop. He opened the door to the room in which they were arguing and profoundly stated he had the answer to their problems: debt consolidation.

Be not fooled; this boy was no seven-year old financial prodigy. His knowledge was derived solely from a thirty second commercial that probably interrupted his after- school cartoons.

I wondered about the way this commercial had stuck in the memory of the child. He may not have known what debt consolidation was, but he knew that whatever it was, it fixed money problems.

I was reminded of this story when I read about “pester power.” The term is used to describe the ways marketers endorse their products through the relentless way children nag their parents for goods. Not only do marketers recognize this behavior in children, they target and thrive from it. The goal is to appeal to a child so intensely that a child will whine and beg to receive a certain product.

(more…)

More predictions for 2008 from the marketing world (or, how else can we stick our logo in front of kids’ faces?):

AdWeeks’s hot trends in advertising for 2008 includes the catchword “authenticity:”

Next year, among other things, marketers will be more careful about the facts that support the ads. Antonio Navas, worldwide cd at Ogilvy & Mather in New York, says marketers won’t have much choice. “You cannot hide,” he notes, “because people are the critics.”

Funny how we people feel strongly about the truth-in-advertising thing.

And even more! ways to reach potential customers, especially in gaming:

More gamers, of course, equals more eyeballs for advertisers. And in-game advertising has been projected to grow from $56 million in 2005 to between $732 million and $1.8 billion in 2010 . . . . 

. . . . agencies will have to evaluate whether the current methods of in-game advertising—primarily billboards and product placement—are as effective . . . . look for more game sponsorships [such as live events and contests] with other partners to promote their products.

And elsewhere:

In 2008, online videos, Webisodes and other potential branded-entertainment productions are going to look better than ever, giving advertisers more sophisticated platforms in which to advertise.

Advertisers will also be looking, of course, towards making branded-entertainment inroads on people’s cell phones.

BrandWeek forsees positive things for word-of-mouth marketing (WOM) in 2008. The good news is that more marketers are seeing the wisdom in adhereing to the established WOM industry standards.

The bad news: not everyone does.

Unilever’s “Go Green and Small With All,” which used in-classroom magazine and Web ads to recruit participants, targeted elementary school kids . . . . Its ambassadors were encouraged to get their families to make small, green changes at home (like using concentrated All detergent) . . . . .

Using young students as ambassadors “reaches our target audience of mothers of school-age children,” says Helayna Minsk, marketing director for All. Incorporating it into a contest “encourages . . . word of mouth and got kids involved collectively,” she adds.

My prediction for 2008? More parents will reclaim their children and not give corporations free access. Find a place for that in your market niche.