Even the very poor kids are obsessed with what's cool to buy. For these concerned psychologists, the giddiness of Internet-driven prosperity masks familial anxiety. Advertisers have seemed eager to feed the communication gap fostered by the information revolution, splitting generations into X, Y and NeXt. But if they accept that compulsive materialism is a simple given of American society, professionals working for Madison Avenue firms still draw vaguely defined limits on the methods used to fan those compulsions. At the very least, they agree, commercials shouldn't encourage children to smoke or drink or have sex.
Children are consumers in training.
It takes a mighty good marketer to satisfy children's wants and needs and not do anything unethical, intentionally or unintentionally. While Paine won't discuss the specifics, he says he also has discouraged clients from using particular ads that depict angry relations between teenagers and their parents or overly coifed preteens, even though such ads, in roiling the emotions of their audience, may lead to greater awareness of a product. On the other hand, the more innocent the product, the more acceptable it is to wallpaper a kid's brain with innumerable iterations of it, in the view of some of these professionals. All rights reserved.