"Consume"

American Newspeak Word Collisions by Wayne Grytting

An estimated 10% of a two-year-old’s vocabulary now consists of brand names. By the age of three, most children can, thanks to the billions advertisers spend on their education, correctly identify over 100 brand names. Sit down with any group of kids and ask them to identify any advertising jingle you can think of, like "Mmmmm, good, mmmm good, that’s what ..." Guaranteed, they will know it. Then ask the capital of a foreign country or who fought in World War I. What you’ll get is silence. Let’s face it, advertisers are now our kids’ prime teachers. Joseph Quinlan, economist at Dean Whitter, says we now have "a global MTV generation." As an educator, I say let’s sell them the farm and head off to the Bahamas. That’s why this chapter deals with two aspects of education: professional and amateur (aka public) education.

Two-Way Discourse

Child psychologists have been happily offering their services to advertisers, thus provoking concerns about the use of science to manipulate toddlers and preschoolers. John Mowen, president of the Society for Consumer Psychology, admitted the justness of these criticisms, but added a timely reminder. "What we don’t want to see," he said, "are limitations on basic rights of corporations to free speech." (Their right to address children is spelled out in the constitution, isn’t it?) Maybe we should have a special time when corporations could address our toddlers. We could call it "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday …"

A Place in the Sun

A major cultural oversight was corrected when a group of advertising firms, lead by Brunico Communications, established the Golden Marble Awards to recognize achievements in children’s advertising. Shelley Middlebrook, a vice president with Brunico, explained the problem their group confronted: "A lot of children’s ads don’t win awards in conventional award shows because [they have] restrictions æ they can’t be too edgy because they are directed at children." (Translation: no thinly disguised S&M shots.) The annual Golden Marbles have helped "set a standard for children’s ads." To appreciate how high the bar has been raised, you should know that the winner of the first Golden Marble was ... Hostess Twinkies.

Baby Wars

In a move that will help countless thousands of babies to internalize our culture’s values, Kohlcraft Enterprises unveiled a line of Jeep SUV strollers. These are bigger, heavier-duty strollers with oversized wheels and a genuine Jeep logo, built to make sure that your baby will not come out second best in a collision with another toddler. Gail Smith, vice-president of marketing for Kohlcraft said, "It was a natural. It’s following the whole SUV market itself." (Could she mean straight back into infantilism?) Besides ruggedness, The Wall Street Journal suggested, "Jeep wants its strollers to be something fathers, too, are comfortable with." And just how do you make fathers comfortable? In America you do it by adding fake chrome wheels, fake lug nuts, fake gearshifts, and fake steering wheels.

Preschool Outreach

Cover Concepts Marketing Services had exciting news for their clients about the "captive audience" it had "penetrated": preschool toddlers. Cover Concepts followed up its success by delivering Calvin Klein notebooks to over 31,000 grade schools. They boast a network of 22,000 daycare centers where they deliver product samples, coupons, and coloring books in exchange for demographic data. That information is then sold to clients like McDonald’s and Kellogg’s to assist their targeted marketing campaigns. Cover Concepts has sparked the interest of eagle-eyed advertisers because, in its own words, it "offers a medium which penetrates an almost advertising-free environment." Just think of having thousands of little preschool minds all to yourself. Does that thought get ad people panting? Let me just say that the copy of The Wall Street Journal I read at the Elliott Bay Bookstore Café in Seattle had been drooled on right below the "advertising-free" phrase. Honest.

Defenders of Childhood

In Sweden, advertising aimed at children has long been banned. Sweden even proposed a similar ban for all the countries of the European Union. This move sparked a keen interest in children’s rights by a coalition representing advertisers. Industry lobbyists were soon circulating a brochure that declared, "Children as consumers have a right to information about the products available to them. This right is enshrined in the UN Convention on the Child." If true, this means parents who interfere with their children’s TV watching could be in danger of being listed as human rights violators. However, a little closer reading of the relevant Article 17, guaranteeing a child’s access to information, has this nasty little clause about it being information of "social and cultural benefit to the child." ("Rats, foiled again," as Snidely Whiplash would say.)