Description
“While companies have advertised to children on television since the 1950s, in the beginning the amount of youth marketing was relatively confined and inexpensive. Things began to change in the early 1980s, as a result of a long battle between government regulators and businesses over policies designed to protect kids from excessive advertising. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had tried to ban all advertising aimed at children 8 and under, but the toy and cereal industries fought back and eventually won, convincing Congress to pass the FTC Improvement Act of 1980. [This] act actually did the opposite of banning advertising to kids: it mandated that the FTC would no longer have any authority whatsoever to regulate advertising and marketing to children, leaving marketers virtually free to target kids as they saw fit. By 1984, the Reagan administration had succeeded in dismantling the last vestiges of government oversight, completely deregulating children’s television.” Barbaro and Earp, Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood. 2008
1. Think back to your own childhood. How were foods marketed to children when you were young?
Do you remember any jingles, toys, from any cereals or snack foods? Or, look up some children’s ads for food and toys from the 1940s through the 1960s on YouTube or www.retrojunk.com (Under TV, there’s a link to view old TV commercials, then under Category select Snacks/Food, Fast Food, or Cereals).
How were foods marketed in the commercials that you viewed or from what you remember from your own childhood?
Now, consider additional ways that food companies are getting to children nowadays (hint: it’s not just the TV). Visit the website Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood
(Links to an external site.)
and watch the following video to see how children are being targeted now:
2. What are some of the changes in how foods are marketed to children nowadays compared to when you were a child or the ads from the 40s-60s?
Summarize what you saw, noting any differences that you find striking, and anything you found especially interesting or important. Please keep in mind that you are being asked to describe in detail the changes that you have noticed about how food is marketed now compared to your own childhood.
3. What is it about kids, specifically, that makes them such a target demographic for marketers?
How have children’s purchasing power and influence increased, and why?
4. Over the last two decades, obesity rates have doubled in children and tripled in teenagers, and the life expectancy of kids is now shorter than that of their parents.
Do you think that marketing to children has led to measurable declines in children’s health? Why or why not?
5. Please describe what you have learned from this assignment.
What influence do you believe these commercials have on kids and their parents when it comes to making food choices?
Unfortunately, when it comes to protecting kids from aggressive child marketing practices, the U.S. lags far behind other industrialized countries. The marketing industry’s spin is that “it’s all up to the parents” and that “parents should be the sole gatekeepers”. Do you agree with this? Should food marketing be regulated, if at all? Why or why not? Should food companies be allowed to market foods to children? Please explain your answer in detail.