EXCLUSIVE, readers, and by that I mean that I sent questions to Morgan Spurlock after I saw his new film, POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, and HE ANSWERED THEM. I’m gushing.

Spurlock was in town promoting the documentary during the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival in April. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Spurlock’s work (Super Size Me, of course, and he also produced What Would Jesus Buy?), and there’s no doubt that a film about product placement was right up my alley, but what I ABSOLUTELY LOVED was that he tackled advertising and children.

PEM: I was pleasantly surprised to see that PWPTGMES addressed the issue of advertising to children, especially in-school advertising, like Channel One. I’ll ask you the same question that I get: What’s the harm? Kids see ads everywhere anyway. If advertising revenue helps educate kids, what’s the big deal?

Morgan Spurlock: I understand that schools and districts need money, but I believe it starts to set a precedent that you will never be able to end.  Once they’re in, they’re in and once it starts, it will only lead to more pointed, larger-scale advertising.  In my new film, a girl in a classroom (in response to being asked what she thinks about [Channel One] advertising being in her school) says that “Schools should teach you how to think, not what to think. And I believe advertising tells you what to think, and that doesn’t belong in a school environment.”  I couldn’t agree more.

PEM: The students you interviewed about Channel One seemed pretty advertising literate, stating that they simply ignore or talk through the commercials while in class. Do you buy it? Are today’s teenagers unaffected by marketing directed at them?

MS: I think we are inundated with advertising and marketing on a daily basis, but the argument that “kids are literate” or that they’re “unaffected” by it doesn’t hold water to me.  Everyone is affected by it, that’s why it exists.  The question is, on what level and to what degree are they affected by it?  I think schools are the one place where we should find a better way to bridge budget gaps than by opening the doors to advertisers.

PEM: Do you think corporations have a responsibility to limit advertising to children? Does our government?

MS: A corporation’s job is to make money, but if part of your consumer demographic is children, then I do believe you have an ethical responsibility to curb how you market to kids.  Now, many folks will say ethical corporation is an oxymoron, and that’s where the government needs to intervene.  It can’t solely be left up to the parents (another argument that I don’t 100% agree with) to police how their children are marketed to.  Parents can provide them the tools to understand what the marketing means, but the government needs to outline the parameters within which that advertising can take place.

PEM: In 2008 you received the Fred Rogers Integrity Award from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. Has what you’ve learned about advertising/marketing to kids while making your films informed how you now parent? How?

MS: I really try to limit the amount of TV my child watches by engaging him in what Susan Linn calls “creative play.”  We have battles with knights and dragons and fly through space in our cardboard spaceships (we just moved so cardboard forts and spaceships abound!).  The day he was watching cartoons and came running into the kitchen to tell me, “Daddy, I want that wrestler set I just saw on TV.”

“OK,” I said.

“But all the pieces are sold separately.” That was the day I turned the TV off.

Don’t you love him? I mean, really?

So I’m a tad star-struck. So shoot me.

During the Q and A at the Film Festival showing, a teacher thanked Spurlock for basically putting himself out there as a social experiment and said she uses his television series, 30 Days, in the classroom all the time.

I think what it comes down to is that I am so damned thrilled to see this being talked about on the giant screen in front of hundreds of thousands of people. It just may open up some eyes to the effects of advertising on kids.

And for that, I say, thank you, Mr. Spurlock.

PWPTGMES opened last Friday in Minneapolis and is playing at the Uptown Theatre.

Image: Morgan Spurlock (Director) and Joshua Wanatik (Stunt son), Jet Blue; photo by Daniel Marracino, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Life circumstances (new day job, new house, and a recent health scare) have encouraged me to do a lot of reflecting lately.

I began blogging more than four years ago; my first post criticized Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. Raising two daughters, I was inspired to write about corporations who were shaping my girls’ views of themselves in order to make lots and lots of money. A sampling:

Less is more, or, may your daughters’ dream be to drive a Disney Princess car someday

Bratz girls are not sexy and you’re sick for thinking so

Time to scream about girls’ Halloween costumes — again

Girls, pay no attention to the naked supermodel sitting next to you, or, Dove’s at it again

Disturbing advertising trends: empowered girls are pretty girls, or, you can bet Hillary Clinton has no unsightly stubble

PTA is a voice for multinational corporate interests, vows to fight frizzy hair

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was researching what would become the foundation of Parents for Ethical Marketing. I’m very proud of the writing and advocacy work I’ve done. But I’ve found I’m not feeling as pressed to pursue these issues anymore. I’d like to think that it’s because my daughters, now 9 and 13, are over the hump — that I’ve ushered them through those years where they were most susceptible, and have come out on the other side successfully.

That may be overly optimistic — I don’t know. But I do know that the world of blogging and social media has changed so much just over the past few years: When I looked for resources to help me parent the way I felt was right, they were few and far between. Amy Jussel’s Shaping Youth was the first blog I read religiously and I found comfort in the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood’s website. I also learned much from Nancy Gruver (New Moon Girls) and Joe Kelly (then Dads and Daughters).

Now we have Twitter and Facebook and so many great resources out there:

About-Face

Hardy Girls Healthy Women

Marketing, Media and Childhood

See Jane/Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media

TrueChild

Women’s Media Center

And some places that even include PEM as a resource:

Jean Kilbourne (*squee!*)

Mind on the Media

Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth about Guilty Pleasure TV

Redefine Girly A blog for Pigtail Pals

7Wonderlicious

All this is to say that I’ve found myself at another crossroads in life, and with a burgeoning teenager in the house, I’ll be stepping back from the keyboard. Not completely, but I won’t be around so much. I am confident that I am leaving my concerns in the hands of many capable advocates.

Thank you for all that you do.

A new study verifies that while very young children are adept at using the internet, many do not recognize ads while others are unable to distinguish them from website content. According to MediaPost,

. . . children — especially those under the age of six — were unaware of the concept of advertising, while older kids may know about ads but couldn’t always distinguish them. “Even when words such as ‘ad’ or ‘advertisement’ marked the ads, some of the children still clicked on them, thinking they were legitimate content,” states the report.

The report recommends:

– ads be more prominent and large enough for children to see in display ads and explicitly state when an ad appears at the start of a video;

– ads aimed at children avoid calls to action (like “Click Here!”) because they draw kids’ attention away from content without knowing they are clicking on an ad;

– that ads have consistent placement on the right side of a page to help kids distinguish between ads and content; and

– when kids click on ads, they are warned that they are leaving the site with options to continue or go back.

The study also made recommendations on how advertisers could make better use of their ad dollars on kids’ websites, which shall not be reported on this blog.

The report was issued by the Nielsen Norman Group.

Seth Stevenson at Slate.com reviews the FTC’s advertising literacy game for kids, Admongo. He echoes some of my thoughts and adds to the discussion by talking with Susan Linn.

The whole project seems relatively harmless. . . . Yet Admongo has its detractors. Two primary complaints: 1) The game is insufficiently critical of the broad, pernicious influence of marketing on modern American culture. 2) This reluctance to speak hard truths stems from the fact that the FTC partnered with PR behemoth Fleishman-Hillard and educational mega-corporation Scholastic to develop and distribute Admongo materials.

Other evidence that marketing to kids is hitting the mainstreamish media:

Marketing Junk Food to Children [DailyKos]
McDonald’s Happy Meals Banned in Santa Clara County, California [Treehugger]
Is the end of the Happy Meal in Sight [The Guardian]

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.