I’m in. I’m taking Mom Unplugged’s TV Turnoff Week Blog Challenge.

I met several media-free families at the CCFC Summit and felt a tad sheepish that I wasn’t one of them. By the end of the Summit I was convinced that no media is good media and charged back to Minnesota with my plan to toss the television out the window.

My husband informed me that that was not going to happen.

So TV Turnoff Week is a great compromise. My challenge will be to turn off the laptop when the girls get home from school and not turn it back on until after supper.

Just typing that now has caused me to hyperventilate.

Want to join in? Head over to Unplug Your Kids – a great blog, by the way — to meet other families who are doing the same. 

Additional resources:

Center for Screen-Time Awareness
Kill Your Television
Stone Soup to Support National TV Turnoff

The number of people who are unfamiliar with blogging always takes me by surprise, as it did at the CCFC Summit. I get so entrenched in the blogosphere that I forget about the whole real world out there. (That’s not good. I’m going to get out more.)

But for my colleagues at the CCFC Summit, and anyone else engaged in activism, allow me to take a step back to answer the question: Why blog?

Today’s post will cover how word of your cause can be spread through the blogosphere.

Blogs reach people. From the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s most recent data:

– 75 percent of American adults use the Internet;
– 91 percent of those use search engines,
– 81 percent look for information on services or products, and
– 39 percent read blogs.

One of the groups that I’m most interested in reaching are parents. According to Technorati (a blog ranking site), there are more than 7,000 blogs identified as being about parenting and more than 45,000 individual posts about parenting.

Bloggers pass information along. My posts reach other blogs and their readers through linking. For example, Mark’s Daily Apple, a health and fitness blog, picked up my post about candy designed to look like illicit drugs. More than thirty of Mark’s readers clicked over to read Corporate Babysitter.

Another good example is an aggregator like BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed takes popular stories and features links to blogs that write about them. BuzzFeed picked up the Abercrombie & Fitch/children’s hospital naming rights story and featured a line from a post I wrote about it. That link brought more than 150 readers — and those 150 people, like the thirty from Mark’s Daily Apple, may never before have been exposed to the concepts behind Parents for Ethical Marketing.

Commenting on blogs is another way to make outside audiences aware of your cause. Every day I run across posts from people discussing the very issues we’re trying to address. If I post a comment on their blog, it links back to Corporate Babysitter and the site becomes a reference for them. I commented on a post about Nancy Nord, former interim head of the CPSC, at the hugely popular blog Crooks and Liars, which brought me handful of readers. I try to comment thoughtfully on at least five blogs a day. 

A blog, over time, becomes an archive of information. Just because a post is a week or a year old doesn’t mean someone isn’t still going to read it. I still get comments on a blog post I wrote on my old blog in February, 2007: Bratz girls are not sexy and you’re sick for thinking so. (Check out the comments if you’d like to see how girls defend their Bratz collections.)

(more…)

As of Saturday morning, the article promoting eating-disordered behaviors at beinggirl.com had been removed.

Thanks to everyone who blogged about this (especially Rachel, where I first read about it) and to those who took the time to write or to call.

I had received an email from Procter & Gamble after I complained and, as noncommital as it was, at least they responded to me (yes, I’m looking at you, Target):

Thanks for contacting us.

We appreciate your taking the time to let us know how you feel. Please be assured I’m sharing all of your comments with our P&G Management Team.

Thanks again for writing!

P&G Team

Did P & G recognize the error they made by publishing the article? Or did they receive a significant amount of complaints from customers? Does it matter?

As we’ve seen before, some companies do listen. Although I still wouldn’t recommend the site to anyone’s daughter, I give P & G some credit for pulling the article.

Onward and upward!

Anastasia at YPulse has an interview with Michael Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, about digital media and kids. It’s not all bad, he says, and for now, I am inclined to believe him. Can’t wait to see the results of their research.  

Taking a short break from blogging — be back next week.

Vision Conscious Brands has a couple more questions for you.

Thank you so much to everyone who responded to their first questions. If you can, please take another moment and answer these:

1. Of the larger, more mainstream toy companies (found in Target, Wal-Mart, Sears, etc.) which do you see as the most socially responsible and why?  Is there a difference between any of these companies?
 
2. If you had to choose one, which issue would you like companies to address (assuming lead paint is already a priority):

– philanthropy or community action,
– reducing environmental waste in packaging,
– recycling toys or toy parts/materials,
– ethical labor practices (wages and working conditions),
– toy safety parent education, or
– something else.

I’ll start: I don’t see any toy companies as socially responsible. I do think that some are less harmful than others: Melissa and Doug, for example, or the National Geographic toys. This has less to do with the companies and more to do with the products themselves. Since I don’t buy licensed-character toys, I don’t buy from most major toy companies.

I would like toy companies to produce toys that have one purpose — to encourage developmentally appropriate play. If toys encourage other purchases (like “collect the set” or accessories, or, “be sure to see the movie”), I won’t buy it. If the company’s marketing preys on a child’s natural developmental insecurities (”buy this because everyone has one and you don’t want to be the only one without, do you?”), I won’t buy it either.

And you?

Working with corporations to ensure their marketing practices sustain healthy kids and families is a vital component of PEM. When I started on this venture last November, I didn’t think we’d have the opportunity to engage companies — or have our voices heard — quite so soon.

Shari Aaron from Vision Conscious Brands has contacted us for some feedback. She wants to take our opinions to her client corporations to help them see why and how they need to “address environmental, social, and economic (ESE) impact issues.” 

Vision Conscious Brands works with clients who are interested in having a positive social impact. Currently, Ms. Aaron wants to show her clients that consumers do care about corporate social impacts and to prioritize our concerns. She can’t do that — and no company will make the move to change — unless we let them know what we want.

Ms. Aaron has provided some questions to get us going. Please respond in the comments, or if you’d rather, send me an email — lisa (at) parentsforethicalmarketing.org.

Chili, blue milk, MC, Amy, Mom, Neena, Jane, Helen, Jason, Solo Mother, Mrs. Flipphead, alimum, Mom Unplugged, Don Mays, Lisa, Robin, Jeff, Katy, Ariah — I bet you all have something to say.

Questions from Vision Conscious Brands: 

1.  Do you spend time learning about how products are made and pay attention to the social and environmental impacts of how companies produce, market, and sell their products? If yes, how do you evaluate this? Where do you get your information? How do you make your decisions? 

2.  Do you provide your feedback to companies? For example, on how you’d like them to perform on environmental and social measures?

3.  If you are concerned about the environmental and social impacts of toy manufacturers:

Have you noticed the latest news about Mattel toy recalls and their safety concerns of the toys they produce?

Has this lead you to changing your buying habits over the past few months?

Do you think this news has impacted sales in a positive or negative way?

The latest financial reports on Hasbro and Mattel do not reflect that consumers are concerned with issues of the environment or safety. So where can I see how this news impacts parents?

Please take a moment to pass this link along to anyone else — parents, aunts, uncles, friends — who may want to add to the conversation.

And thank you.

Congrats to parent advocate Susan Pagan, Susan Linn, and CCFC — you’ve inspired us all to continue the fight to obliterate America’s happiness!

Not all parents think that advertising to children is bad, as I discovered from the recent email and comment onslaught about the Target ad controversy. Many people, proponents of the free market economy, have suggested that if consumers want something, they will buy it, corporations will make money, shareholders will benefit and all is good. Companies have the right to market to kids. That’s the way it is supposed to work. 

What do parents want? asks marketer/mom MC Milker in her comment here.  An end to all marketing directed at children? That’s unrealistic, she says. And I have to – reluctantly — agree.

I would argue, however, that there is a point when more more more becomes too much.

Rob Walker (Murketing) examines logos and spin-off products in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Among 39 different Tide detergent spin-off products, “All that’s missing are sugar free- and menthol.”

Hugh Graham tackles the designer’s place in our consumer culture, noting the volume of toothpaste and related products in the store aisles:

I wonder whether it’s possible that our society in general may have gone just a bit too far, and that the designers and product managers and marketers are spending too much of their creative resources on selling products with limited value and without any real differentiation.

I’m not arguing that there isn’t valuable product innovation going on, but I tend to doubt the big change involves one of the 50 swirly paste/gel combos on every American supermarket aisle.

This is how I feel about the choices we have for children’s products. Fifty different Bratz dolls, fifty different Barbie dolls. Anything left has a Disney Princess painted on it. No differentiation. No innovation.

So, if we can’t stop corporations from trying to sell to our kids, perhaps we can make it worth their while to reconsider how they are doing it. Do their marketing practices and products sustain the health of children and families?

This is what I want from corporations and marketers, and the basis for creating Parents for Ethical Marketing in the first place:

1.  Do not take advantage of my child’s underdeveloped reasoning skills or her insecurities to convince her she must have a product.

2.  Stay out of the public schools. Advertising to kids while they are truly a captive audience is, well, kinda creepy. 

3.  Do not make toys that are lethal. Honest to God, how hard is it to figure out if something you are selling is a choking hazard? And if you insist on producing toys in China, here’s a hint: Buy toys made in the other line.

4.  For every new product that encourages my daughter to express her inner princess, provide something that encourages her inner jock. For every fashion doll with clothing and hair accessories, create a doll with a backpack and some books. For every movie or cartoon or book that focuses on a girl’s search for true love, make one where she pursues a meaningful goal.

5.  Stop encouraging my kids to be crap collectors (I’m talking to you, McDonald’s). Hugh Graham concludes:

It occurs to me that there needs to be a new paradigm of consumption, one that will work for business, community, and environment. I don’t know what form this new paradigm will take, but I believe it has something to do with learning to appreciate the real value of things and their place in our world.

Designers have an opportunity to engage in this paradigm shift. Part of the story lies in creating products that have intrinsic and lasting value, products that I like to call artisinal. And part of the story lies in better communicating the value of the artisinal. I believe that designers have an ethical duty to work toward the end of disposable culture. Of course, this isn’t going to happen overnight, and it’s not going to happen in vacuum. But it is going to happen, whether we choose to be a part of the process or not. Better to engage the future rather than have it thrust upon us.

That’s me. What do YOU want?