Icy Waterfall

In period 2 we are doing a video conference with Harvard psychologist Susan Linn on advertising that uses psychology. She is the director of a company named Campaign for A Commercial-Free Childhood. We start with Rhiannon who asks what is her company and it is a group of concerned citizens trying to stop the commercial exploitation of children. They try to get people to think about it by getting it in the press and to pressure companies. For example they said how Shrek is poster character for health but in the last movie Shrek 3 they had 16 junk foods associated with the movie. Ms. Linn says that commercial advertising to kids is a bad thing because in research it says that it is a factor in obesity, violence, eating disorders and even doing well in school.In 1989 they spent 100 million, and now companies are using 17 billion dollars to advertise to children. If she was in this position, she wouldn’t in it because she doesn’t think it is ethical to advertise to young children unless you care about them but if you do it for money then. In her opinion her worst type of advertising is viral marketing. Viral marketing is when they get kids to advertise their product. For example FaceBook is going to send ads to people on your friend list to show that you are interested in that product without your consent. But friends have to option to stop to ads. For example in FAce book and Myspace they could become friends with Sprite. Corny. She also thinks marketing to babies is bad. In Myspace people hack into your password and put in ads on your page. There is no law that you can not make a whole ad for a toy. There also use to be a law you can not advertise under 8 years old but Congress took it away. Now there are only restrictions. Advertisers think of cradle to grave advertisements where they try to own the consumer. They advertise to young babies so when they are adults they remember it. They can also become loyal to their brand and if they are, they could be less likely to do comparison shopping which means if a brand they know makes its price higher than they would care because they are already loyal to the brand name. Companies use brand licensing to advertise to young babies. They encourage parents  to have their babies room filled with Disney Princess or Spiderman. So when the baby gets older they start to get interested in the character. Also advertisers want parents to put babies in front of a screen around the time your born. Then babies when they get older get more dependent on screens. If we started as a country to say that advertising to kids is bad then people would lose a lot of jobs. Instead we should train them to do some thing else. Advertising could rule the world because it could effect democracy and critical thinking.