not since the end of world war two at the height of the baby boom have there been so many kids in our midst there are now more than fifty two million kids under twelve in all in the united states the biggest burst in the youth population in half a century and for american business these kids have come to represent the ultimate prize an unprecedented powerful and elusive new demographic to be caught up in captured at all  costs there's no doubt that marketers have their sights on kids because of their increasing buying power the amount of money they now stand on everything from clothes to music to electronics totally and some forty billion dollars every year but perhaps a bigger reason for marketers interesting kids maybe the amount of adult spending that american kids under twelve now directly influence an astronomical seven hundred billion dollars a year roughly the equivalent of the combined economies of the one hundred fifteen porus countries one economic impact of children is the money that they themselves spend the money that they get from their parents or grandparents the money that they get as a while and when they get older the any that they earn themselves that is a is an increasingly significant amount of money but that's not where the real money  marketers and advertisers have realized that the real money related to the children's market is in their purchasing influence an because of their purchasing power and because of their purchasing influence marketers and advertisers have become much more deliberate in their strategies in attempts to influence those dollars  children who often determine what kind of car gets bought what kind of computer gets bought what kind of cellphone program and even where they take family holidays miserable marketers have actually studied the whole nagging phenomenon which corporations do nagging better and they provide advice to corporations about you know what kinds of tantrums work better children sometimes say you know can i can i can and it's meant as nine times did so these kids have a lot of power in the economy the advertisers know it and they are going after them in a way that is unprecedented  this generation of children is marketed to as never before they're being marketed to through brand licensing through product placement marketing in schools through stealth marketing through viral marketing there's d v d s there's video games there is the internet there i pods there are cell phones but there are so many more ways of reaching children so that there's a brand  child's face every moment of every day what we have is the rise of three hundred sixty degree immersive marketing where they trade around the child every aspect of every other kids are inundated with th using more than one medium at the same time so they're surfing the web and the television is going with m t v and they've got the i pod with one ear buddy and and they are more vulnerable and are bombarded with over three thousand commercial messages every day marketers know these are a little sponges they're so wide open and they want to get that brand loyalty from life because that's big bucks it's about people wanting to convince our children that life is about consumers going up to represent the greater part of any communities practicing hard children very definitely on the influence in the purchasing of everyday commodities children have participated for a very long time in the consumer marketplace but in the advertising to kids may have been confined during the seventy's but it was during this period that it become into its own as an industry ban on advertising to children eight and under the central trade commission staff believes that children are deceived by telling it's an advertising particularly a commercial for cereal with sugar in it and it wants to stop all advertising a congress of the united states under pressure from advertisers and marketers actually rob took away from the federal trade commission the right the authority to regulate advertising marketing to children and what little remained government's power to regulate children's advertising would be dealt a final fatal blow in the early one nine hundred eighty s government is not the solution to our problem government is the problem in the one nine hundred eighty s this country was in a situation of falling in love with the market thinking that the market was the solution to everything and of deregulating industry for those of you with television stations i have an announcement june no i've never liked big government and i think you would agree there's no reason to subdue the judgment of washington bureaucrats for that of professional broadcasters by nine hundred eighty four the reagan administration had completely deregulated children's television all bets are now off corporation now realize that congress was not going to do anything to restrict their power to marketing to children they now actually had more power and lo and behold a lot of really smart marketers discovered children as a huge market in the decades prior to deregulation kids consumer spending increased at a modest rate of roughly four percent a year sense deregulation it's grown a remarkable thirty five percent every year from four point two billion dollars in  four to forty billion dollars today and eight hundred fifty two percent increase deregulation really opened the floodgates for a kind of marketing to children that never existed before the mid  it became ok to create a television program for the sole purpose of selling a toy easy and sure enough in the year immediately following congressional action the ten best selling toys were all based on kids television shows that horrible it was the beginning of a new era for childhood marketing than a few years after deregulation when the teenage mutant ninja turtle movie came out there were four thousand projects length to the movie it was also the t v show children were seeing every day and there was the comic book the slightly older children started to look at recess saturation of the whole childhood culture it was only after he became so successful that they developed a lunchbox now they develop the lunchbox and the dolls before star wars ultimately it's a very i mean this is why people like george lucas has said i am not a lightsabers hats snacks cups more snacks wind up toys action figures cereal and even a bestselling book and so with deregulation a new world has been opened to marketers free now to turn the most powerful emotional attachments of kids into unheard of little mermaid part of your world and then who is holding the strings well it's the marketers who want to sell kids a wide variety of products so you wind up having junk food promotions at fast food restaurant breakfast cereals that with images of the main characters from the movies you have bed sheets so the children literally go to bed thinking about the images and then they go to school with their backpacks and their lunch boxes with the locals and then they get to school and their friends have on the t shirts and the shoes and they want them square pants was crass best selling macaroni and cheese i personally know a five year old who told her father in no uncertain terms that sponge bob square pants macaroni and cheese tastes better than any other macaroni and cheese now how do you argue with a five year old about that i mean what do you say you say well no it doesn't and then she says well yeah it does well you know really no it does i know it does well have you ever had sponge  no but i know that it tastes better growing up is a very strenuous difficult and sometimes hard and scary process for children one of the things that gives them some stability and continuity in that is their attachment to touchstones in their lives and among those touchstones are characters clifford the big red dog mickey mouse these are constants in their lives these are things that they have figured out they feel they understand and that they feel comfortable with and indeed in their own way love when you take that and you leverage that into saying you know eat this food you are basically leveraging that very powerful emotion that the child has that very powerful attachment to make money have not limited themselves to dropping the names of beloved characters to sell their products with increasing brazenness they've also begun to drop the products themselves directly into kids entertainment classic kind of joy and so is this honest advertising it's the sept of advertising it sneaks by children's critical faculties and implants it's messages in kids brains when they're paying less attention american idol which is a top rated television program for two to eleven year olds is just right with coca cola product placement american idol brought to you by coca cola the gilmore girls the pop tarts for breakfast and also product placement is getting more and more prevalent in video games and when ads haven't been serving as a backdrop in video games they have become a video game with children now is likely to be on the internet as in the playground they're exposed to so much advertising they learn to ignore it that's why advertisers love internet games not just day it's not just games they're advert games she can score with skittles break with chips ahoy or hang out with sponge bob it's part of this by any means necessary i mean we've got to get to the kid we've got to sure that child is indoctrinated as a consumer good at so therefore we've got to get to him in ways that maybe they don't even know that we're getting to them this new world of advertising and taint and entertainment as advertising no longer seems to recognize any boundaries especially with the rise of new media technologies children with cell phones have become a prime target for marketers selling products it's because one in four american kids between the ages of eight and twelve has a cell phone that's five million children and that number is expected to double in the next three years so phones make children much more vulnerable to advertising its advertising literally companies are using text messaging in an order to reach kids i mean if your child has a cell phone and that cell phone has internet access then your kids being marketed to you know in ways that you don't even know so we have to stop thinking of marketing to children as just commercials i mean commercials are just so twentieth century with more than forty million kids on line daily and growing perhaps no tool has become more important to marketers than internet and advertisers are making sure to hit kids where they gather where tens of millions of elementary aged kids are coming together to chat play games and watch videos all while being immersed in the brand for example millions of kids a day chat with each other explore and shop in a virtual world a world open only to those who go to a designated store and buy a fifteen dollars stuffed animal imprinted with a secret code that allows kids to internet allows people to be micro target if you have the person's birthday you could say happy birthday billy have you seen the new power ranger watch it's very personal if you set up  from five different geographic areas on different genders on different ages with different preferences you will see five different ads you'll see five different worlds now as a child you don't know that as a child there are so many ways that commercialism has intruded into our classrooms there's a coke and pepsi you can bury schweppes in the schools which are helping to generate an epidemic of childhood obesity among our kids across the country here's schoolbook covers they are our sponsor educational materials there's a company called field trip factory which takes kids to places like code and to sports authority and calls that education the chicago kindergartners are on a school field trip  the animals they're going to see are no we want to welcome you to across the country a growing number of schools are taking america's classrooms to america's law there's a new company called bus radio which is trying to large there is channel one which compels about seven million children to watch ads in schools each school day today on channel one the purpose of schools in port is to promote reason and the purpose of advertising is to subvert reason to promote to sell the product and for that reason alone advertising has no proper place in the schools how often does a company realize that they're going to get a captive audience where people literally have to watch their message the effort to create junior consumers no longer stops at the school door it is now following kids into school but if it's been following kids into school it's also been coming out of our schools in the form of advanced academic research producing a new class of child marketing experts armed with some of the most formidable scientific too psychologist and anthropologist and sociologists and behavioral scientist are used by marketers to really shape and cement children's and brand preferences they want to be part of the fabric of children's lives twelve years ago there were no youth converts as where you looked at more effective ways to market to kids now there are probably fifteen a year different conferences on tweens teenagers the latino community how to reach youth with your product  program your packages your characters your advertising campaign how to reach them more effectively how to get more their dollars which is marketing and you can't blame people for that but is it balanced with more conversations more discussions of what's good for kids how can we move our society forward in a healthier way no child psychologists and other psychologists are now absolutely integrated within the marketing field and there's techniques are so widespread that it fact it's probably pretty hard to come up with parts of the marketing effort that don't have anything to do with psychology you're a psychologist you do research you know the difference between a three year old and a five year old and you know how to reach a three year old and you know that you have to play the ad much more slowly and use round figures instead of angles because children like around figures at that age and you know that five year olds have a whole different set of concerns so we can fine tune the marketing to eyes especially kids who don't have the sense of self monitoring you know that all their actions are very descriptive and once we take what they say and then feed that in with how they look when they say in their behavior or cues we really end up with a strong measurement of how product affects them still another means ethnographic research which tends to the goals of marketers have become a kind of scientific stock in they go into supermarkets with them and film exactly how they look at a product pick it up put it back down the way they move around the supermarket they film them on the playground they film them in school they film them eating breakfast they film going into their closet and deciding what to wear  what are the things that you need that are an entire you know they film them talking to their friends they organize little friendship circle and film what they're doing they've followed them into the bathroom i interviewed a number of people who sat and watched children take baths and showers watch how they interact with shampoo and so health and beauty products as that category is called in order to go back and write a report for their clients on you know what to do with the packaging it's creepy it's just absolutely creepy the way children are being dissected and put under the microscope by mark this is new consumer science and it fueling a new science of childhood and perhaps nowhere else have the different elements of this science merge so seamlessly as in the girl's intelligence agencies not the cia it's the girl's intelligence agency which for all the cloak and dagger is actually a marketing from the girl's intelligence agency claims to have tens if not hundreds of thousands of girls across the country that it is in contact with and working with the signature product of the g i is something called the slumber party in a box take that opening it's our ask to sort of push a certain product or they're more like focus group parties were kids are asked to come and give their opinions on on products the hottest item sleep but the beauty they ask them to be  they ask them to get information on their friends without their friends knowing about it it's teaching children to exploit their friends for the purpose of getting money or free products what happened at your home the other day marketing or was it a children in its marketing efforts without their parents knowing about it there's a lot that's happening around us and public is not aware just like they're not aware of neuromarketing and that's another whole scary thing to put a child in an m r i and then watch what is lighting up inside his brain based on the stimulus and then saying wow this works this is good look what happens they do blink tests on kids for example they develop ads and then see how frequently a kid blinks or turns their eyes away and when they see the kid blinking more they change the ad to make it more mesmerizing there's stuff they just can't take their eyes off and it's not an accident they've gone over and over and over with extensive high tech kinds of testing the prices to find the precise configuration of characters colors music words and so forth that kids can't resist they want to spend time understanding child development understanding the child's need to belong a child's need for community a child's name for service to move product and if we know in new products with a certain creative execution place in a certain type of media vehicle then we've done our job they are tomorrow's consumer at tomorrow's adult consumer so start talking with them now build that relationship when they're younger and you've got them as an adult i say these marketers are very similar to  experts if you're going to be a pedophile or a child walker you have to know about children and what children are going to want kids love advertising it's a gift it's something they want there's something to be said by the way about being their first and about branding children and  owning them in that way and antisocial behavior in pursuit of a product it's a good thing advertising the product is pushed not on the basis of what it can do or how it tastes but of its social meaning so kids are taught to want candy or sugared cereals or soda because it's cool cheesy it will define them as an individual what you buy is who you are there's a montra in american society you are what you have you are what you buy you are what you o the corollary of that is and if you don't have that then you are less then you're a nobody you don't have self esteem and this happens even for children i think the thing that upsets me them most is that it's not just products that are being marketed to children but values and the primary value that's being sold to kids over and over and over again is a value that things or st brands will make us happy the costs of participating in the consumer culture for children have escalated  dramatically fifteen years ago from my first sony which would be you know a kids version of a tape recorder or music player would cost far less than the adult version but today it's know one two three four even a very very expensive product we're seeing elementary school girls six seven year olds articulating adamant preferences for designer jeans that cost one hundred to one hundred fifty dollars that's part of that shift from children's culture being a cheap culture to a very upscale children's culture in which it's not only branded but it's designer brand that's the basic consumer identity you could try thinking of things that remind you of each note do you think it's shallow it's about me me it's about me it's really a disservice to kids i think part of what we need to be able to tell kids is that it's fine to have nice things is nothing wrong with having nice things but don't mistake that for happiness and satisfaction and about twenty years where you want to be  player a teacher when in the when i first started seeing children as a psychotherapist about a quarter of a century ago i would routinely ask them what they wanted to be when they grow up and w things like a nurse an astronaut or or some profession that seem clamorous to them by the way what does your father do for a living he designs designs what missiles missiles and what are you going to do profound of their psyche in that world and materialism kids are not allowed to be kids anymore they have to grow up fast we see it in the in the way they're being asked to address the violence they're being asked to navigate and what's getting squeezed out is childhood marketers even have a name for this trend they call it kids getting older younger first go to girl of the fashion world the natural developmental urge is to be older more mature faster no one who is seventeen read seventeen magazine it's the ten and twelve and thirteen year olds who are reading it to understand what it's like to be seventeen what is happening is that marketing is taking advantage of that natural urge and of little girls out there and they have a lot of buying power tween in between and between what i don't know i don't know what's before because the bottom end of tween is constantly getting younger used to be i believe  twelve and now it's six twelve and it can't afford a toy and this gives you a clue to some of the perverted thinking that's going on in this field the idea that a six year old is no longer a child but is between childhood and adolescen one of the crucial aspects of this trend is that marketers never communicate their adult messages and values to kids simply as kids but as boys and as girls and girls are being taught they need to be pretty sexy and what they buy determines their value in health they look determines their value it's true that to some extent advertisers have always appealed to girls at this level  but there can be little doubt that something radically different has emerged over the past few years while one part of you cognitively may be able to accept belly shirts when you're seven years old are you emotionally mature enough to handle the outcome when you go out in public and people look at you like you know an underage britney spears with boys we see the same pattern while to some degree marketers have long targeted boys with what would seem to be adult messages messages that equate being a man with aggression and toughness and violence today's boys are merced in an altogether different with boys what we see is the use of images of violence power domination at very young ages with videogames for example we went from sixteen bit to thirty two bit to sixty four bit one hundred twenty eight the technology in about five years what that means is that we're getting closer and closer to virtual reality the amount of violence entertainment violence that young children are exposed to is startling they're getting a message that when you have conflicts you fight with violence that you have to fight in order to resolve your differences that's what you do the federal trade commission report that came out looking at the marketing of media to children showed that indeed the media industry was marketing material to children that even their own rating systems said were too young for that material the studios confirmed to congress today that children as young as nine years old were chested for their reactions to r rated violent movie clearly there were times during the per discussed in the f t c report when we allowed competitive zeal to overwhelm sound judgement and appropriate standards so that the very people who are making the product are telling you what's appropriate for kids and there has been a shift in the space of a decade of one full ratings point so what was an r rated movie is now a p g thirteen they don't use child development experts in deciding this and the questions they ask are not is this ok for kids it is would parents let tightened up on letting kids into our movies was that the sexual content drug content alcohol tobacco profanity adult content migrated into the p g thirteen movies so there are a lot more like what are movies these to be and a hollywood movie that's rated for older viewers p g thirteen or  has a whole line of toys and products marketed to children three four and five years old  despite growing concerns about the industry's explicit strategy of age compression its drive to reach kids younger and younger ages has only accelerated the result is a massive and growing toddler industry that almost from the womb now blankets babies in brands it's really hard to find baby paraphernalia that's not plastered with media characters you can find unbranded baby stuff but you can find it in high end toy stores but if you go to places where poor middle class families shop it's all branded so the babies start out life with the notion of consumption and that's not an accident what they want is cradle to grave brand loyalty that's what they talk about share of mind they talk about owning children for life  there's been this recognition apparently that children as young as six months of age can recognise a brand so now if they can recognise plants we're going to make sure they recognise our brain as a marketer is interested in getting to that child at the very very beginning to begin to shape that child's worldview to begin to shape that child's brand preferences to begin to to basically tell the child in a sense what that child needs in order to have a meaningful life and that's where we see as mothers that's our job and it's not theirs to turn in such a world millions of parents are now finding some solace in what appears to be a counter trend it's a new media movement that claims to be good for infants and whether we're talking about developmental d v d s like baby einstein and brainy baby or twenty four hour programming for infants and toddlers on t v the idea is that good media is the best antidote to bad media kids would be all right if parents would simply turn their children away from the commercial clutter and turn them on to educational media because kids don't just grow up they think up but the question is is any of this even true there is not one iota of research evidence that shows that they teach children anything or that the children who experience these things that early ages are any different in terms of their educational capacity or their fund of knowledge later on down the l it is a huge hundreds of millions of dollars a year business and they're selling it to parents insecurities they're basically letting parents think that if they don't get these things their children will be behind but with this home video and being labeled you know kind of  maddox increasing the size of their brains the majority of parents think if they don't put their kids in front of media early and often that they are going to be behind other kids and even as this industry has been making big educational claims it's been making even bigger profits sales of infant videos and d v d s purporting to be educational expected to reach seven point eight billion dollars by two thousand and ten after her daughter was born julia clark searched for ways to share her love of music and art with her child so she borrowed some equipment and began filming children's videos in her basement baby einstein company was born and in just five years  business grew to more than twenty million dollars in sales julie arguer clark this is a billion dollar industry that is a complete and total scam there's no evidence that a baby watching a d is learning anything educational videos aimed at babies may not be such a bright idea after all a new study found that children who watch popular d v d s like baby einstein and brainy baby actually have poor vocabularies one researcher even said she'd rather have babies watch american idol the american academy of pediatrics has now for seven years recommended that there be no screen media use for children under the age of two and this is for some very specific reasons first of all there is no solid scientific research evidence that children under the age of thirty months are two and a half years can learn anything from an electronic screen a lot of media early may in fact change the way the brain develops three new studies out tonight are the latest to suggest that heavy television watching can hurt children's ability to learn the more television infants and toddlers watch the greater the chance they'll have trouble paying attention in concentrating during their very early school years researcher during the first two years of life their brain is rapidly developing and what we know about optimal brain development during these first two critical years is that face to face involvement with other people parents siblings other kids interaction with other human beings manipulation of the physical environment trying to stack the blocks up or get a cheerio in your mouth creative open ended problem solving play is far better than the best edutainment software you could ever have what's the most important thing for you to your room the single most important thing is the social dynamic of the bond that occurs and the intimacy that occurs between there in child forget the rest of that piece lays the bond of trust in the foundation for all higher learning later that has to occur so if you're sacrificing the trust the bond the attachment issues for the sake of having a baby einstein or computer or videos in the room you're missing a huge understanding of child development the space that is necessary to think is being jeopardized in your immersed your outside theirself your taken out when do you have quiet time and unstructured time and when is a child able to child remember playing baseball until it got so dark you couldn't see the ball any longer how about hiding and pretending you couldn't hear your name being called home to dinner that was back of course when kids and just about all kids played outside starting the moment they got home from school that was before x box of course a recent report from the american academy of pediatrics found that commercial media is radically transforming the way children play their report found that even though free and unstructured play is essential to the cognitive physical social and emotional wellbeing of children the amount of time six to eight year old spent playing creatively has been declining dramatically over the past decade and for nine to twelve year olds of the same period creative play has declined a staggering ninety four percent think that it's important to remember about creative p is that it's the foundation of learning it's the foundation of critical thinking it's a foundation of problem solving it's the foundation of empathy and of you know the experience of being something else and it's the way that kids make life meaningful what's happening is that children are being deprived increasingly of opportunities to exercise their imagination parents are being encouraged to hand baby cellphones because of the sesame street content or the nickelodeon content we now have you know screens in the back of minivans and portable d v d players for toddlers we're raising a generation of children who are never going to have the experience of having to amuse themselves or having to calm themselves down and so they're always going to need a screen and that's exactly where the marketing industry wants them and when children play with toys that are based on media products they play less creatively because they're not spurred to make up their own world potter watch and they can't play some hero and must they have all of the paraphernalia that goes with it straight from the becomes check act in a way they're being told their magination isn't good enough it's not good enough to pick up a stick and turn it into one you have to have the real one and it's ok the newest greatest robot toy does everything for you you don't have to play with it anymore it just plays by itself you watch it great and at a cost i don't even put the thing together anymore no model making no thinking coloring no painting it's just all ready for me and ready to go the fundamental message that i need something outside of myself in order to play is really harmful and tragic because it starts to take play out of children's hands so that kids need more and more and more in order to be able to play and in order to be happy we're creating a future generation of super rather than consuming less our children will consume even more than the baby boom generation or the generation y or x what does that mean for our future for our well being and for their wellbeing forty times as many young people are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder than thirteen years ago attention deficit hyperactivity disorder almost four and a half million children in this country been diagnosed with others are writing a growing number of prescriptions for every depressions for children as many as eight million a year one in three children born in the year two thousand will develop diabetes first time in decades the rate of hypertension in children is rising this generation of children is the heaviest in american history an estimated sixteen percent of all children and teenagers are overweight four times as many since the one nine hundred sixty s it's kind of like we're saying in our society we don't care about their rhetoric about kids we're treating them as one thing