At Issue; 47; The Kiddie Market

Nett has issued the Kitty Markt take two. There are 41 million children in the United States between the ages of three and thirteen. Almost all of them are exposed to advertising in print media, radio and television like this commercial. Families with children spend more than $200 billion annually on consumer products. According to one survey of mothers, 94% admit their children demand products they've seen on TV. Thus, the TV tube lights up a highly lucrative market, and advertisers spend close to a quarter of a billion dollars annually in television advertising.

The National Educational Television Network presents, at-issue, a weekly commentary on events and people in the news. At-issue this week, the Kitty Market, an examination of children and advertising. Newton Minow left a lasting impression on television when he described it as a cultural wasteland. reporter David Englander asked his opinion on the impact of advertising on the pre-adolescent youngster. I'd like to answer the question about the impact of advertising on children really in terms of the impact of television on children, because I think the television is the dominant medium affecting children's impression of advertising. All the serious studies would indicate that television doesn't affect children very much.

I regard that as an indictment rather than any comfort to the people in the television industry. This is the greatest medium of communication over-invented. It's the most powerful medium of communication. And to think that after a child has been watching television, spending more time with television than those with a schoolteacher, that it has very little effect on him, is really a terrible calamity and a terrible waste of one of the great gifts that we have of modern technology. A more positive view of advertising impact on children came from the President's Council on Consumer Interests. It's Chairman Esther Peterson. I think it's very great, but it depends on the child, too. Children differ as do parents and as do people. And so much depends on that individual and on that individual child. But you see, there's so much of it. When you consider the impact every day or from the television, from the magazines, from everything, even on our little league baseball suit, you can't move without it.

So it is there, and I think the impact is very great. It's one of the great educational forces in our society. Jack and Jill, one of the most widely read children's magazines, recently opened its pages to advertising. It's publisher Robert L. Young. We're education in the sense of a wanting, we want to make learning fun. We don't simply say to a child, here's what we're going to teach you, and then we teach it to them, and then we say, here's what you learn. We try to make learning fun for the youngster. So what we try to do with an advertiser, and they seem to welcome this, is to say, look, here's the possible way. Here's a way that you can possibly put your advertisement, where it can be fun for the child, too. And where he can involve himself directly in the ad, and learn from the ad through his own personal involvement. And we have many good examples of that. Many wish I'd like to show you. Well, for instance, here's, I think, a very good idea, and this is in the August issue of Jack and Jill. It's the Riggley's ad, which pops right up with a little bobby bear story.

Now, this isn't direct advertising, it isn't advertising hitting a child over the head saying, buy this, buy that. It is, it's educational, in the sense that it talks about the bear, and yet it does relate to Riggley's chewing gum. The concept of involving the child has spurred the growth of New York's hellitzer-wearing and Wayne agency. We developed special techniques that relate specifically to a philosophy that was involved from going into this market very deeply. It started with a recognition that children in order to learn must be involved. Have you heard about pretzel? The pretzel? Pretzel, the new toy dog. He can catch a ball and roll it back. Impossible, let's watch. See the pretzel on his back? Pretzel runs fast, fall his leash, and he'll follow you.

Let go, he goes back, all by himself. Great! But let's see him play ball. Watch this trick, when you roll the ball to pretzel. He caught it! Flip his ear, he rolls the ball back to you. Hey, pretzel is a lot of fun! And I just made up the sword. Pretzel, pretzel, pretzel, pretzel. Pretzel is a lot of fun. This commercial employed special art techniques. It had a very simple childlike approach. It employed a very interesting jingle, which actually was a public domain tune, which was familiar, and which the children could again join in and sing and relate to. And in addition, it had one other element, which was something that tickled the fancy and imagination of children. And that was the use of talking dogs, real dogs, talking and delivering the message, which tied in perfectly with the product and delighted children who saw the commercial. Another novel aspect of the direct advertising approach to children is in market research,

where the kids themselves are asked to evaluate television commercials. One of the pioneers in this field is the EL Riley Company. Mr. Riley explains. For years as the children's market grew, research people examined it from every conceivable backdoor approach they could find. The child's mother, father, storekeeper, teacher, even his older brother and sister. No one approached the child himself. We did. Oh, tiny tumbling is taking a trip. She's a real baby, darling. She moves. Yes, I am a little straight woman. Maybe she can be a little looking, but she hasn't. Oh, I would surely live a little, a little longer.

Oh, she didn't decide. OK, Listen! Today, not last night. She has lots of dresses you think she can buy. Oh, look, Virginia's on Volina. She's a real baby doll. She moved. Behind your one thousand. OK, Robin, now I'd like to ask you a few questions about the commercials you just saw. OK? Which commercial did you like best? Second one. And what did you see in the second commercial that you liked? The children from different countries. And why did you like the children from different countries? Because the way that they talk and the way that they dress. The precise effect of advertising on the minds and emotions of young children is a subject of far-reaching controversy and sharply contrasting opinions from both experts and parents. For 76 years, the Child Study Association of America

has concerned itself with children's problems of everyday living, which today includes television advertising. The impact of advertising has a great deal to do with the way kids respond to certain kinds of things in their lives. The fantasy is a very valuable and very important part of the youngsters learning. Off times, there are conflicts caused by very virtue of the ways in which the youngster has a difficulty in distinguishing between fantasy and reality. Let me use an example. On the television screen, there will be a beautiful cartoon diagram of the digestive tract with little gremlins going through. And little youngsters wondering, do I have these kind of gremlins chasing themselves through my insides and whatnot? Because kids are concerned about bodily function, about themselves. Secondly, I think this is equal if not greater importance.

And that is a distortion of values, very superficial. The materialistic is overemphasized as contrasted to, in my estimation, more real, basic human ethical values, human values, individual social values. I've always been one to accentuate the positive, and I rather like it, I'm afraid. I would make a per-parent who criticizes advertising on television. I think it develops discrimination in youngsters. I think it is often more creative and imaginative than the programs themselves. You're not here condemning advertising. I think some advertising is very accurate, but the problem of finding the accurate advertising is a difficult to problem, it's a problem of discrimination. And children at early ages have a real question of believing. They tend to, let's say, if an ad comes on for soft drinks to accept the ad at face value.

And I think this leads to great distortions. Thus, the impulse to have a soft drink in your hand is far stronger than have a glass of milk in your hand. And people who would shield a child from caffeine or prone to get caffeine soft drinks, which leads to problems in nutrition. There's some splendid advertising in some of these areas that really appeal to the fantasy and the imagination in a constructive way, but also it can be negative in some of the other areas where it is appealing again to the other kinds of, I think, for example, the over appeal to the sex motive for children and for teenagers is something that is forcing an adulthood on them a little early. One of the byproducts of bad advertising is that it makes children cynical. If they buy something and get burned, whether it turns out to be a shotty or inferior piece of merchandise,

they don't believe what they see or hear and become almost immune to claims or to the American language because they find the words don't mean what they say. Television advertising is a part of our society. It creates another challenge for the child as well as a parent to cope with, but in the process of coping with it and handling it, evaluating, discerning the objects being advertised, there is ego growth, personality development, and it enhances personality development. In other words, there's an opportunity as well as a potential pitfall. Television commercial, I think, is good for the children. They can learn from it and it's just like an education for the children, because they can see it and they can hear it and know what it's for and what we use it for. That, I think, is very good for the children.

I object very strongly to the television personality. Someone the child has become accustomed to thinking of as a friend or someone he watches and enjoys, who suddenly becomes a carnival pitchman without changing his tone of voice, without moving to another part of the room, without disassociating himself from being the child's friend and entertainer. He suddenly starts selling things. The child can't tell the difference, and frankly, sometimes watching neither can I. And I think that this just makes it difficult and confusing for the child, and it's not very flattering to the entertainers either. Around Christmas time, I find it terribly uncomfortable to watch television commercials, particularly, because there must be so many families who simply cannot afford to buy any toys at all for their children, for Christmas. And to have a parent's love equated with what a parent gives a child is a very morally irresponsible thing to do, I believe.

Sometimes when my children watch television and see something in the television, and she said, Mommy, I want, I tell you, I don't have any money for I buy something, you know? And I don't feel happy when she said, Mommy, I want something for I don't have any money, I don't feel happy, you know? Now, if the mother is sure of her affectionate feelings and her love towards the child, she'll find it relatively easy to say, well, no, Johnny, we just can't afford it, we don't have the money, or I don't want you to have it. And that's the end of it.

Johnny then has to like it or lump it, and he usually doesn't like it, but he accepts it. Well, I don't like commercials, so I yell to them out. The fact is that in an area as vast and complex as child development, there is no conclusive evidence to prove that TV advertising has a strong or lasting impact on the average child. However, there is one area of controversy where criticism is specific and down to earth, namely that some products, particularly toys, are misrepresented on television. Getting a toy is a pretty exciting thing for a child, and it looks forward to being able to use it, but there's really nothing worse than getting a toy and seeing dad play with it and finding that you can't make the pieces go together, or you can't balance them, or the wheels won't turn, or you're not strong enough, or big enough, or the thing isn't made well enough, doesn't hold together. And the child just becomes frustrated and angry, and the parent is usually the one he's angry at.

The parent is angry at the TV. I used to make a rule in my house, no TV toys at all, and that made me sort of an old girl, but then you expect that. But once in a while I'd see something that really looked quite good to me too, so if I bought it and took it home and it didn't work out, which it rarely did, there was a disappointment not only in the toy to my children, but I think in a way they were disappointed in me. And one woman I know, who had a large angry family, who kept nagging him for a while, said, all right, we'll do it right, and she went out and she bought every single thing that was advertised on television. The children were forced to sample them and completely rejected them, and they all did very happily ever after. The National Association of Broadcasters monitors TV commercials through its code authority. Stockton Hilfrich, manager of the New York Code Office, answers the charge of misrepresentation.

There were parents who were extremely upset about the initial toy advertising three and four years back. Additionally, the toy manufacturers themselves were pretty unhappy about the image they were creating. A typical example would be to synthesize a toy here. Some sort of rocket, a toy rocket, perhaps reflected in the television commercial by something like actual shots of a rocket, let's say, taking off from Cape Canaveral. This would then be transferred to a shot of the toy rocket, but with the same sounds, as background noise, from Cape Canaveral to glamorize the toy. This obviously where the judgment of children pertains would be misleading and misrepresentative. So that in the toy guidelines which have been created, there are a number of things which would hit at this kind of practice in which you're now under pretty darn good control.

All of this was done for your interest with the voluntary cooperation of the toy industry itself. Here's competition by advertisers for the favor of youngsters has led to intensive field studies on how a child makes a product choice. Here again is Gene Riley. This particular test is one that we run in supermarkets, normally in clusters of 20 children each, where the youngster makes his own product selection in this particular sequence. You see eight-year-old Scott in a supermarket, followed by a junior monitor shopper, making his selection from among 20 product classes. The monitor shopper asks him three questions. Why the one he chose was his favorite. Whether it's the same one his mother normally buys, and if it's not, what his mother normally does buy, and why he selected that one. When we asked you to pick out your favorite bubble bath, I see you picked out Soaky.

Now, why is that your favorite? Because you don't have to wash yourself. You don't have to wash yourself. Well, who washes you then? Soaky. Oh, Soaky does. How come you selected that monster toy? Do you like that? Do you think children like monsters nowadays in their toys anyway? A direct approach to children is resented by some parents as an invasion of their authority. But here again, there is more than one point of view. A recent appraisal of children's advertising was written for the reporter magazine by Arturo Gonzalez. I was a little bit disturbed in my research for this reporter article to find that some of the advertisers and some of the advertising agencies consider a three-year-old a consumer. I do think that television is perhaps an ultimate weapon in the hands of an advertiser, and in that sense it's possibly quite dangerous. While I was in Asia, I spent some time covering the war in Vietnam, and as a result of that, perhaps I think in military terms, but it seems to me that

you have here on one side of the front the family unit, which collectively, and I'm talking about the adult and the almost adult members, the teenagers and the eight, nine, ten-year-olds, they all understand what purchases the family can make. They know that the family can't afford a new car every week. They know that the family is only going to buy one brand of toothpaste, and that tube is going to be used until it's all gone, and then another tube is going to be purchased. On the other side of the front, you've got the advertiser, and the advertiser has for years been probing this family trying to break through and make lots of sales, and they've used every medium available to them, radio and billboards and television, and so on. The problem with this increase in advertising to children is that a great many advertisers have suddenly found the weak link in the family defense. They're pouring through here, they're attempting to roll up the flanks of the family.

In any military breakthrough, there are always atrocities, and my fear, and I think that came out of my article a little bit, is that there can be atrocities of taste, of salesmanship in this attempt to break through the young child as a sales target, and this is what I am worried about. I find that occasionally the TV commercials invade the realm of the parents' decisions when they go away from toys and into the realm of things like sneakers. It's a parent for a parent to decide if her child needs sneakers or shoes when he needs them, which ones to buy, and things like they should be advertised during the adult watching hours, not the children's hours. The mother is the one that's supposed to know what's good for the children, you know? If my child come and tell me, Mommy, I want you to buy me this. If it's good for you, I buy it for you, but if I know it's not good, I won't buy it.

I raised my children away, and my parents raised me. My parents taught me not to ask for anything good, of allowance from the family, and so that's the same way I taught my children. When they see things, not to ask, just look on television, they're looking while on watch, they don't ask for the thing they see, because they know if they ask, they still won't get it. And they know if their parents could afford it for them, they would get it for them. Inevitably, the controversy over children's advertising focuses on the issue of responsibility and what to do about it. Sonny Fox, children's TV performer and producer, comments. Well, I think in terms of responsibility, overall responsibility for television commercials in the children's area, it's not a linear problem. You don't begin here and go here and proceed. It's a circular problem. There are a lot of people sitting around that circle with the little kid in the center.

And each one of those people on that periphery of that circle has to accept a certain amount of responsibility. Now, this includes the advertiser, the ad agency, the station, the MC to whatever extent he can, and so on, all along the line. Each one of these people seems to me, has to accept responsibility. Now, everybody plays sometimes, passing the book or, you know, musical commercials, when the music stops if you don't have an excuse you're it. But the point is that we all have a responsibility. We all have, I think, a responsibility to children not to exploit them, not to pass on to them attitudes, which concerns me greatly, attitudes which are unfortunate attitudes, in an effort to sell. And in the long run, it's the parent's responsibility. Anyway, you have to say no to youngsters once in a while and you might as well do it on the TV front as any other. The parent simply has to assume that if his particular child is seeing too much of something, then there has to be exercise some degree of control.

The broadcaster, on the other hand, should hardly duck behind that, as justification for not exercising his own responsibilities. It is also the responsibility of the parent, not to have the TV as the babysitter for the child. And just let the child sit there and view everything and then blame the advertising agencies or the TV. The parents must assume their responsibilities in this area too. The advertising industry is terribly well organized. It's a big mammoth organization with tremendous power. Really tremendous power, the best skills and abilities of our country are employed there and are directed there. And in contrast to that, where is this mother with her child, where are these children? It's a completely unorganized group, except through the PTAs and the organizations. And I think it's one role of government for us to get this voice together, to use it and bring it together and present it constructively to the medium and the groups where it's concerned. Well, I'm at the school that advertising and programming should be separated.

I don't think that in television we can expect a real change until the sponsor doesn't have much to say about the program. In other words, I would do the same way we do the newspaper field or in magazines. You buy commercial space for your product, it's perfectly legitimate. In fact, a necessary interest in our economy, but you don't interfere with what programming decisions are made. Because this inevitably leads to the advertiser wanting to reach the largest audience and debasing, I think, the general quality of the program to reach the lowest common denominator. So I would be in favor of divorcing the advertiser in the program. If there are commercials which offend the parent, in which the parent is unhappy with the commercial, I certainly think the parent should take pen and hand and write a blistering letter to the advertiser. Nothing will get an offensive commercial off the air faster than to scare a nervous advertising agency.

And an even more nervous client with the thought that perhaps his advertising message is not gaining him new customers but losing him old ones. If a parent writes in and tells an advertiser that they do not like the commercial, they do not like a given item, they are not satisfied with the quality. If they appeal to media who carry these items and tell the media people that they are dissatisfied, the advertisers are super sensitive to the parent's condemnation or approval and they react to it and they respond. And this is the protection. There is a growing concern with the effect of advertising on children, but it appears that the parties involved are not facing up to their specific responsibilities. Few advertisers will admit that their primary obligation is not to children but to their clients whose products they are pushing in the kitty market. Most parents refuse to face the fact that they allow children to spin the television dial pretty much as they please.

The government is slow and heavy-footed in cracking down on those advertisers who are guilty of fraudulent or misleading commercials. Thus, the voice of the salesman still dominates the airwaves, while protests in behalf of children remain feeble and disorganized. Former FCC Chairman Newton Minow has suggested that advertising and programming should be separated, but he still looks rightly to a free society to find its own answers without coercion. Somebody once said that democracy was really nothing more than a chance for self-discipline. And I think that's true particularly in advertising. The people who are in the business and the agencies at the advertiser companies must realize that they're dealing here with an influence which could be one of the most salutary in the making of a child's mind, child's spirit. And nobody else can do this. The government can't do what or shouldn't do it.

I think this really depends on the self-discipline and the self-responsibility of the people. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.