Susan Linn, author, psychologist, and award-winning ventriloquist, sits down with Dr. Oz to discuss the effects of media on your child’s brain. From screen time to marketing, Linn breaks down everything you need to know about raising children in a multi-screen culture - and how these forces are undermining your child's creative play. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
And we need to ask ourselves, what can society do?
Even as we're talking about parents, because the reality that one family in isolation is going to be hard put to combat a $16.8 billion industry.
We need to think about what corporations can do, what the government can do, what schools can do.
And in the context of that, there are things that parents can do.
One of them is to look at their own values and their own issues around consumption.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Uh John St. Augustine, as always.
Pleasure having you here, Lisa.
We're here with Susan Lynn, psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Consuming Kids, Protecting Our Kids from the Onslaught of Marketing and Advertising.
Now, Susan's a psychologist by professional training, but I love this about you.
Whenever you have this kind of a bio, you know, when it's accountant-line trainer, you know, that kind of combo deal, it gets your attention.
So Susan is described as a psychologist, okay, award-winning producer, understandable writer, yeah, puppeteer.
How does that work?
Well, actually, for my own truth in advertising, I'm a ventriloquist.
Oh, you are?
Yes.
Oh.
Why don't you say something?
So you can pretend you're a member.
I'm so happy to be here today.
Oh, that's really good.
I wish I was here in person, but I can't be because I'm a puppet.
That's amazing.
How do you do that?
We need a little Charlie McCarthy doll.
That is amazing.
We also have to get two guest releases now because somebody else is speaking.
I'm not signing anything.
That's really good.
How do you learn that?
I started as a child.
I started when I was six years old.
Somebody gave me a puppet.
How do you make the noise without moving your mouth?
That's just practice.
Put your teeth together.
Smile hard.
Some letters are harder to say.
That was pretty good.
Peter Piper picked a pack of pickled peppers.
Oh my gosh.
The P's and B's are hard.
Nobody likes a show-off in Chuck Lewis.
No.
I have enough trouble articulating words as it is.
I'm going away, as soon as I can.
That's incredible.
So, in addition to your, this is wonderful, a ventriloquist, maybe they didn't put it here because they couldn't spell it, is an associate dean of the media center at the Judge Baker Children's Center at Harvard Med School, and a co-founder for Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood.
Now, I've got to say, Susan, that when I was a child, I wasn't allowed to watch television.
And the reason for that had nothing to do with commercials.
It was my parents, old school folks, they had immigrated from another country, Turkey, believed that I had too much to do to watch television.
And they had grown up without a TV. In fact, when I was born, there was no television in Turkey, even then.
I remember watching the very first shows in Turkey around 1968 or 69, and it was Casper the Ghost.
Those are the first television shows I ever remember.
And they only had television for two hours a day, from three to five.
They made it for the moms.
And then you had the news and you were done.
And today, of course, it has changed quite dramatically.
And I watch my kids, and I think they all are guilty of this, but the youngest one, Oliver, who has the least supernatural restriction on his comments, will watch a commercial literally turn to me as it finishes and say, I want that.
So there's no question a huge power in advertising.
Kids translate information to action much more rapidly than adults do.
And you've made part of your career understanding and describing this phenomenon.
And your book, Consuming Kids, Protecting Your Kids from the Onslaught of Marketing and Advertising, is a treatise on this.
What got you interested in the topic?
I was raising a child at home in the 90s, which is when advertising and marketing was just escalating exponentially.
I was working with children, and also I was in a position at the media center to start tracking the media.
The mission of the media center is to work with media to promote the health and well-being of children and to mitigate its negative effects.
And you couldn't think about media without looking at the marketing.
So it was affecting the children I loved the best and cared about the most, and also I was in a position to see it at work.
And the thing that really, you know, sort of changed me from just a concerned professional to an activist was Teletubbies.
When public television imported Teletubbies from Britain in 1998 and they marketed it as educational for babies, it was the first time ever that a television program had been promoted as educational for babies.
And they had absolutely no evidence that it was.
And because, you know, parents trust public television, they were sort of turning to the program in droves.
And what it was doing is hooking babies on television, which is where advertisers and marketers reach children.
And there's no evidence that any kind of screen media is beneficial for babies.
There's mounting evidence that it may be harmful, and yet, you know, we are hooking babies on screens from birth.
The Teletubbies, I remember seeing them, and they're very frustrating for adults.
There are other shows that weren't so frustrating for adults.
I could watch Barney, frankly.
I could deal with Barney.
Barney wasn't marketed to babies.
And I have no problem with the content of Teletubbies.
In fact, my work isn't about the content of the programming.
It's the marketing.
And what we have to do when we think about programming for kids now, we just can't think about whether what they see on the screen while the program is on is beneficial for them.
we have to look at the marketing plan and all the different products that are being marketed with these programs.
So we can say, well, this program does a good job of promoting reading to children, but supposing it also does a good job of promoting junk food or promoting toys that inhibit creative play rather than promoting it when creative play is the foundation of learning.
We're here talking to Susan Lin, author of Consuming Kids.
How do you get your arms around this topic?
I've been a member of several panels at the national level that have looked at advertising, in particular, to kids.
It is tough, I find, anyway, to understand what role legislation should play when we deal with advertising in kids.
It's tough, I think, for the people paying for the ads to figure out where to draw the line.
If you're an ice cream company and you want to advertise ice cream, Inherently, the product is not in your best interest for health, but if you're going to eat some ice cream, you want to have them eat your ice cream.
Drawing a line in the sand so they get enough advertising to want your ice cream versus someone else's versus pushing you to want ice cream when you wouldn't have wanted it is a very difficult place to play.
I think that we need to draw the line at children.
I think that, and I know that this is controversial, and when I first started getting interested in this and concerned about it, people were saying, oh, you know, it's impossible, it's never going to change.
But people have said that about a lot of socially concerning issues that really have changed over the years.
I mean, slavery, for instance, in the late 1700s, these Quakers got together and said, we've got to end slavery.
And then lo and behold, 60, 80 years later, they did end it.
And marketing to children, in the almost 10 years I've been working on this issue, and the reason that I wrote Consuming Kids is because I really see it as a major threat to public health.
And one way to get our arms around it is to think of advertising and marketing as an industry in and of itself, We're good to go.
Precocious, irresponsible sexuality, youth violence, underage drinking, underage tobacco use, family stress, the acquisition of materialistic values, and the erosion of children's creative play, which doesn't sound like much until, as I said before, you realize that it's a foundation of learning and critical thinking, creativity.
How does it undermine creative play?
In several ways.
And one of them is that the toys that are marketed the most to kids have two things in common.
One of them is that they're likely to be linked to media programs.
So if you have a toy, it already comes with a set script.
And a set way of being in the world.
For instance, Elmo is always Elmo.
SpongeBob SquarePants is always SpongeBob SquarePants.
That's true even with adults.
I've done workshops teaching adults how to use puppets.
And I find if I give them generic puppets, they come up with all these creative characters.
But if I happen to have an Elmo puppet or a Big Bird puppet, that character is always the character that they see on television.
So it inhibits creative play that way.
And another way that it inhibits creative play is that most of the toys that are marketed to kids today have electronic chips in them.
And so the toys end up actually having more fun than the children do.
The toys do more.
And people who work with children who know about children know that the best toys are toys where it's 90% child and 10% toy.
It's interesting.
I never thought about that element of it, but that's true that a lot of them come mechanized.
They have programmed paths and the child has to watch the toy do the acts.
Right.
over and over and over again.
And the thing about this kind of a toy is that it's really good for the companies who make them because ultimately they're boring.
You know, they look like so much fun.
And they look like fun because what it looks like when you see these ads on television is that the toys are coming to life.
And isn't that what children want?
They want their toys to come to life.
But then when they get the toy, what they see is that they push a button and the toy does something.
And then they push it again and the toy does something again.
And how much fun is that after a while?
And what happens, I mean, the messages that kids get from marketing, it's not just products that are marketed to them, it's also values and behavior.
And the fundamental value that our kids are immersed in, in this culture, This industry that's spending $16.8 billion annually targeting children, the message that kids get is that things will make me happy, brands will make me happy.
But as you know, and my colleagues who do research on this sort of thing, what they're finding is that things don't make us happy.
What makes us happy are more ephemeral.
Things, job satisfaction, relationships.
It's not the things that we own, but kids get this message.
So they get a toy that they desperately want, that they've seen advertised.
They get it, and they're so happy and excited, and then it doesn't make them happy.
Then they want something else.
Does that apply for jewelry, too?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, Lisa, the jewelry will not make you happy, honey.
You keep telling yourself that, honey.
Yeah.
Oh, it absolutely will make you happy.
I make an exception for jewelry.
Protecting your kids from advertising is a challenging area.
So you actually went underground, which is the first chapter of the book.
I did.
Yes, I did.
So what are some of the notes from the underground?
I went to an advertising and marketing conference, and before I went, I work with a psychiatrist named Alvin Poussant, who's very well known, among other things, for his work in civil rights and on behalf of all kinds of children.
And so I went to him and I said, gee, how should I behave at this conference?
How should I be at this conference?
And he said, quiet.
Quiet.
He said, just be quiet.
So I went, expecting I would not say a word, and discovered that I was in a workshop where I had to introduce myself.
And, you know, so that was kind of interesting.
I mean, I said I was a psychologist.
I was interested in marketing, which is true.
I didn't tell them I was writing my book.
So what did you find?
I found that this is the first conference on children I ever attended where there was no mention of whether or not what they were doing was good for children.
And that's really troubling to have this industry that has so much power where the health and well-being of children isn't their primary goal.
It's really to make money.
When we come back...
I want to talk about the NAG factor, which many of us have experienced firsthand.
Branded babies.
And finally, the endangered species.
We have a lot more to talk about, but first, let's take a quick break.
In the studio today, Susan Lin, psychologist, member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School, the Media Center of Judge Baker Children's Center.
And she's written a book called Consuming Kids.
And she's also co-founder of Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood.
We're talking about that basic issue.
So let's talk a little bit about...
Actually, you know what?
I want to ask about the nag factor in branding babies.
But in the context of all this, what can the parents do?
That's what the producers are all asking me here.
What's the parents?
They're the stopgap, right?
Well, you know, that's a question.
I mean, I think there are things that parents can do.
Turn off the television.
As we talk about it, I think we need to put it in a larger context, and we need to ask ourselves, what can society do, even as we're talking about parents?
Because the reality that one family in isolation is going to be hard put to combat a $16.8 billion industry.
Thank you.
One of them is to look at their own values and their own issues around consumption.
If it's important to you to have the biggest car, the newest clothes, the latest jewelry, except you, Lisa, of course.
Actually, you bring this up, and I'll make it personal.
I don't think that we're a very consumptive family.
I'm a plain person.
This morning...
I've got to do this television thing today.
So I asked Lisa to cut the hair in the back of my neck, which she always does.
She's been doing that for 22 years.
It's ridiculous.
I sit there, she takes a little clipper, she clips the hair in the back of my neck.
And she was thinking about how little some of the things that we do have changed in the entire year time that we've been married.
I'm not extravagant.
I don't like going to big, big restaurants and having fancy dancy things.
I'd much rather stay home and play basketball with the kids.
That being said, our lifestyle is anything but simple.
I understand.
I'm not speaking...
I don't think that we're hermits, and certainly we don't restrict what we do, but the kids come home with brand awareness that I don't understand.
When they're arguing about Prada bags, I actually couldn't pick one out of a lineup.
So, can you release a kid, but they're being influenced by things beyond the parents.
Yes.
So, the ability, it has to be proactive.
It's not just a matter of us taking things away.
We have to actually go out and deal with that issue in a proactive fashion, or it's not going to happen.
Right.
That's right.
And I think you raise a really good point, that even for people who care about these issues, who are concerned about them, who try to limit advertising and marketing in their homes, their kids are exposed to it at school, you know, really just about everywhere.
Right.
So it's very difficult for parents, and it's true, some parents may have an easier time than others, and some of it also depends on your children.
I mean, some kids are more social than others, and if they're more social, they may be more influenced by peer pressure.
Some kids are more acquisitive than other kids.
So it's a combination of factors, and I think that...
It's easy to lay the blame completely on parents, but it's unfair in the context of the $16.8 billion industry that's working day and night to bypass parents and to undermine parental authority.
Give me two ideas that you found in your research to be potentially helpful for listeners out there.
Two things they could do today to change the influence of advertising on their kids.
Within their family.
You're talking about within the family.
Short of pulling them out of school.
Altruism is a good antidote to materialism.
And so one thing that you can do is get your kids involved in the larger world and involved in giving in some ways.
And this could be, you know, if you sit down at the end of the year and make charitable donations, involve your children on that.
One thing I used to do with my daughter from the time she was two is every Thanksgiving we would go and buy an entire Thanksgiving dinner for another family and take it to a food bank.
And that was a good platform for talking with her about hunger and giving.
And it evolved and changed as she grew and her understanding of what we're doing changed.
And the most recent thing she said to me was, Mom, don't you think it's a little hypocritical that this is the only thing that we do?
I thought that was great.
That's great.
That's right.
Alright, so the first is altruism, which is a great antidote to commercialism.
So you cultivate a culture of service within your family and your people around you.
And the needs of a larger society.
And that's, you know, antithetical to the messages of the marketplace, which are me first, you know, just care about yourself.
You know, that kind of thing.
What about restricting behaviors?
And then the other piece is that we do have to be able to say no to our kids.
And that's harder for this generation of parents for some reason, I think, than it was in the past.
Why is that?
Lisa and I were talking about this recently.
It's absolutely right.
It is...
So much more.
I mean, I look at how the kids interact with their parents today, and it's very different from how...
I sound like an old fogey when I say this, because I'm sure our parents were saying the same thing about us when we were acting towards them.
But the kinds of interactions that this generation of parents, us, have with our kids...
Well, the way our kids talk to us versus the way we would speak to our parents, still speak to our parents.
So what do you think is causing that?
I think that some of it is the culture...
And sort of the way that children are portrayed in the media and this whole thing about empowering kids without really thinking about what empowering means.
And the other is, I think, that to the credit of this generation of parents is that they tend to To respect their children as individuals, maybe more than previous generations.
And that makes things more complicated.
I mean, if you respect your child as an individual and you want your child to be able to voice an opinion, you've got to be able to deal with that opinion.
And that, it's more complicated.
I mean, so I think that it's messier to raise children, you know, with that sense of feeling as though their opinions matter.
You have to balance that with constantly giving in to your children's opinions, which isn't really good for them.
And one of the things that's concerning is that what market research is showing is that children influence parents' spending about all sorts of things from cars to vacations.
And now what's happening is the marketing industry targets kids with ads for vacations where they can go on vacations.
And what's central about that vacation is that their favorite TV character is going to be there.
Right.
And that's very sad to think that, you know, going swimming into a beach isn't enough of a vacation now.
You've got to have a media character along.
Well, I think part of this whole parenting thing is in part due to marketing.
Because I've noticed when I was growing up, my mother and I would not shop at the same stores.
Ever.
We would not wear the same clothes.
We wouldn't like the same things.
And that was kind of...
I understood.
There has been, in terms of marketing, a blur of the generation gap.
So I'm wearing these sweats that my 13-year-old daughter will wear.
It expands the pool of people that can buy something if you don't limit it to a certain age group.
But it's that way across the board.
My daughter, oldest daughter, when she could drive, wanted us to buy her a Mercedes.
So, no, I'm not kidding.
And you rushed out and did it.
No, absolutely not.
But everyone, a lot of the kids in the school parking lot had...
We were applauded for saying no.
No, they had Hummers and all kinds of high-end cars.
But I think that it's a deliberate...
Maybe not an evil plot, but there is a deliberate effort on the part of marketers to blur the generation so you can have anybody buying the product.
You don't limit it to one group.
One of the things that marketers talk about all the time is kids are getting older, younger.
Kids are getting older, younger.
And the old people are staying young longer.
And now they have the other acronym, which I can never remember, which means staying younger longer as well.
I mean, and so essentially, I think what the marketing industry wants is for us all to be adolescents for as long as possible and to give in to those adolescent needs and to buy things to establish our identities and all that.
And what's really concerning about that is that they market to six-year-olds as though they were 13-year-olds.
They're called tweens, right?
Tweens.
And they invented a whole demographic.
And now, for kids younger than six, the marketing industry is calling them pre-tweens.
You know, trying to get, again, you know, a specific demographic.
And on the one hand, they're saying these kids are different from older kids and younger kids.
But on the other hand, what they're doing is lumping six-year-olds with 12-year-olds and marketing to six-year-olds as though they were teenagers.
So now we have six-year-olds who are really teenage wannabes.
At the same time, we have 30-year-olds who are also teenage wannabes.
That's what the marketing industry wants, and we're just all letting it happen.
You know, it occurred to me when you two were talking about, we're all about the same age, and I remember, of course, we didn't have...
I look younger.
Much younger.
I look younger.
Much younger.
Behave younger.
Only on Mondays or Tuesdays.
Rest of the week, I'm good.
But it occurred to me that there was this time when our parents, you know, they didn't know how to relate to us, and we didn't know how to relate to them.
And the quickest way to make somebody like you was to buy them something.
And so now you don't have to go through the, you know, going out camping with the kids and kind of thing and bonding with them.
You just buy them something and immediately they like you.
And of course, you do more of it because they'll like you more.
We were having this conversation about a cell phone before I left to come out to New York with my son.
And my mind still says, get a dime and make a call.
But there's no phone booths left so he can't do that.
He was so concerned that he didn't have the phone that his friends had.
And I was shocked because I thought, well, who cares?
You can make a phone call is the only reason you have this phone.
So I have two or three old ones laying around.
I'm like, well, just redo those.
Oh, my God, Dad.
I mean, yeah.
It's astounding to me.
You use that.
Well, yeah, if you like them, it's what you use them.
But there's this thing that, you know, there's this gap here where, as you said, people even nowadays, I mean, older people still connect who they are with what they wear, what kind of watch they have, whatever it may be.
And I don't know how we move people off that.
Well, I think that one of the things that we need to do is take a long, hard look at advertising and marketing to children.
Behaviors and values are formed in childhood, and we do have this commercial culture that is, in fact, toxic for children.
So, Susan, your book, Consuming Kids, is an effort to try to uncover a lot of the subtleties to marketing to children.
Let's talk about food, since this is ostensibly a health show, the Dr. Raj show.
Give me some concrete examples of how...
People can change the marketing culture.
Is it a matter of us saying, okay, from now on we're not going to have advertisements on foods that are deemed to be unhealthy for our kids on the airwaves at certain hours.
They won't be allowed on certain types of programming.
Is it better done through consumer groups boycotting certain kinds of programs that allow certain advertisements on there?
I mean, how does that work?
Well, you know, the United States regulates advertising and marketing to children less than most industrialized countries, most industrialized democracies.
And one thing that we can do is take a look at other countries and see what they're doing.
In this country, we're in love with the market, and we think that the market's a solution to everything.
But, you know, it's not a solution to the health and well-being of children.
I mean, that's really clear.
So one thing we can do is limit or stop advertising and marketing to kids, and we can do it in a variety of ways.
We could do it by stopping marketing on programs where a significant portion of the kids are under 12 or under 8. We could limit it.
If you're talking about food, we could limit food that doesn't meet certain nutritional standards that have been set already by the government.
There's lots of different ways that we can do it.
What we need is to build the public will to do it.
And when it comes to food marketing, I think that, in fact, that's starting to happen.
How's it happening?
I'm asking, Park, because I follow this closely.
I've been part of some of these debates.
I just don't know how you actually start drawing lines in the sand in this country.
Many folks just have a difficult time believing that regulation is a solution.
Well, you know, we have had administrations for several years that really believe that regulation is the devil, essentially.
And, you know, people have been told that.
And one thing that's happened in this country is that we mix corporations up with people.
We think the corporation should have the same rights as people.
And I think that that's a problem, you know, in terms of thinking about regulation.
But first of all, we already have regulation.
So we're talking about, you know, maybe expanding the regulation.
We do have some regulations about marketing to kids.
We regulate the number of minutes on commercials on certain television programs.
So we already know what programs are geared towards children.
We're already regulating some things about that.
We could stop advertising unhealthy food on those programs.
Or we could stop advertising on those programs if we could find a way, which we could, to fund them.
I caught a title of one of your shoppers, it was pretty intriguing, Peacekeeping Battle Stations in Smackdown, Selling Kids on Violence.
Yes, that's one of the things, you know, that we, as I said before, it's not just products, it's also values and behavior.
And one of the things that's terribly concerning are the violent toys and violent media that's being directly marketed to children.
do this in a variety of ways and one of the ways they do it is that they'll have a movie that is rated pg-13 which means that the industry itself says it's not suitable for children under the age of 13 and then they'll have toys that are marketed to preschool kids and so that's very I mean, it gets the kids and the toys are advertised on television programs that young children watch.
And so the kids desperately want the toys.
And the message is, well, if there are toys for this movie, then the movie must be okay for kids.
That's one piece.
And the other are the violent video games, which the best-selling video game in 2000 and I think 2005, the best-selling video game for preteens was one where you could have sex with a prostitute and then kill her.
And that was for preteens.
Is that right?
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Why would they even make that?
I mean, that's crazy.
I think one of the things about video games, I've just been looking at some video games because we're putting together a little video about video games.
I've been looking at some of the new ones.
And I think that we can't, if you've never been involved in playing video games, you have no concept of what the violence is like.
It's not like The Lone Ranger.
Right.
Or Starsky and Hutch.
It's not like that.
It's beyond anything that you can even imagine.
I mean, there's a video game coming out where one of the things that you can do is castrate somebody.
More questions after the break.
Today we're talking with Susan Lin, a psychologist, knows a lot about the mind, but has made it her passion to study consumer advertising, in particular to children, Her new book, Consuming Kids, Protecting Our Kids from the Onslaught of Marketing and Advertising.
So we've talked a little bit about some of the frustrating elements of marketing, and let me come to the one that really is irritating to me, and that's Sex is a Commodity.
I think it sends so many different messages in so many different ways to kids who are going through different stages of their life that it's no wonder that they come through with a lot of ambivalence about some important mores.
So what did you find out when you researched the role of sex?
Well, one of the things is that sex and this sort of precocious sexuality is being marketed to an ever-younger group of girls.
That it's not just preteens, it's really even preschoolers are being marketed highly sexualized behaviors and values.
And again, all we have to do is look at the dolls that little girls are being given to play with today and the dolls that are being marketed to them.
I mean, the best-selling dolls are dolls that promote a particular female body type and also the newer ones sort of have this kind of in-your-face sort of sexuality.
And one of the things about the fact that the market is so cluttered is that the way that companies get noticed is to outdo them, is to become more shocking.
And so you start out with one kind of doll, and then you have to have a doll that's a little more shocking.
And the way to make it more shocking and more noticeable is to make it more sexualized.
And that just keeps increasing.
And the messages that we give our children, we teach our children about the culture through the stories we tell them, the toys we give them to play with.
And so it begins with really little girls.
And then the clothing that's being marketed to really young girls.
I get complaints from parents all the time.
They can't find clothing for 6 and 7 year olds that isn't really highly sexual.
And I think it's important for people to remember that The sex that children learn in the marketplace, the sex that they learn from the media, it's not like the sex that they would learn in, for instance, sex education in the schools.
Whether you believe in sex education in the schools or not, you have to...
You have to understand that the people who want to have sex education in schools want to for the well-being of children.
It's not because they're making money off of it.
But the sex that kids encounter in the media and the sex that's sold to them is sex as power, sex as commodity, sex as violence.
I mean, it's often not even sex in relationship.
That's really troubling.
It leads to the other big theme that I still can't understand how we can't get our arms around, which is alcohol, tobacco, and other substances that kids have always been known to be attracted to.
It's one of the ways they can show their grown-ups.
And there are some icons from the advertising business, Joe Camel, which you're not allowed to put on ads anymore because it was just too clearly attractive to kids.
But there are others that have taken its place.
One of the things that was concerning in the Super Bowl a couple of years ago when there was all the brouhaha about the halftime show and the sexualization and the halftime show and everybody was all shocked and upset.
Well, that was the same Super Bowl where there were all of these alcohol commercials that featured talking animals.
And if you have talking animals in an ad, you're not targeting adults.
You're targeting children.
Animated characters, they're targeting children.
And both the alcohol and the tobacco industry really depend on underage use.
I mean, with alcohol, I think...
I think I read it was 15% of alcohol sales go to kids who are underage drinkers.
I mean, that's a lot of money that we're talking about.
And with tobacco, I mean, if you don't smoke by the time you're 19, you're likely not to be a smoker.
They have to target children.
Well, Susan, it would seem to me that if I was running one of the big beer companies and one of my competitors ran an animation, which, granted, you're going to get kids with that, but a lot of adults like animations, too.
It makes it a message that comes in a very different medium.
I would use that as ammo and go after them.
I'd spread all kinds of bad rumors about that competing company saying they're purposely going after kids.
They're, you know, bad-mouthed them in as many underhanded ways as I could because it's just business.
And make it socially unacceptable and, in fact, risking getting ostracized if you're willing to take liberties with how we advertise to kids.
Yeah, and then the question is, is your campaign going to end up bringing you in as much money as the animated ad?
Yeah, no one's going to buy beer because they feel like you're a moral beer company.
Yeah, but if you boycott the other beer company, you're the major competitor.
And most businesses, they are two big players.
I just think it's an interesting ploy.
We were talking with Lisa's brother about this.
There are all these class-action lawyers who come after big companies.
They drive companies that actually didn't do anything wrong out of business.
And you would think that the shareholders of the companies that were wronged in the lawsuit would go after the class-action lawyers.
Yeah.
I think it's a pretty good business model.
If there's someone being hurt, there's always someone who could benefit from them not being hurt, in theory.
I'm just looking for innovative, out-of-the-box opportunities here.
Certainly, that's what I would do.
Consumer boycotts is what you're thinking would be a good thing.
Consumer boycotts paid for, funded, advertised by the major competitor.
Smear campaign.
Sort of like politics.
Oh, smear campaign.
By the other...
Beer company A runs...
Beer company A finds some animated figure that's really popular, does well.
Then beer company B comes after them, saying they're children of Satan, arguing that their logo is actually from a devil's covenant.
They're doing the same thing, Mehmet.
They'd rather just have a better animated...
But that's the conventional approach is make a better animated cartoon.
The non-conventional and perhaps successful approach might be to hold the higher ground and then go after.
Don't let someone else do it for you.
Use your money instead of running another app on Super Bowls to run a bunch of op-eds, which, by the way, bring you free media.
Well, Chris, then you would have to be absolutely pristine.
Your business practice is totally pristine because then the other company is just going to go after you for something.
They will anyway.
That's politics, right?
You still want the kids buying your beer.
Maybe not.
That's actually the bigger question because if what the real goal is, is both of us advertise to kids, we'll get more people drinking.
That's a bigger fear.
Yeah, and I think that if a significant percentage of alcohol is sold to underage drinkers, that's a lot of money that would be lost if companies stopped advertising and marketing to kids.
And that's why I think that self-regulation ultimately is failing.
It's failed.
It's not going to work.
Because the companies aren't going to...
It's not in their best interest financially or the best interest of their stockholders to stop marketing to children.
Can you imagine a stockholders meeting?
And this year, we cut back on sales and promoted public health by 15%.
I don't think that's going to happen.
Well, consumers also buy stock.
And there have been opportunities to change practices in business.
And you're right.
I don't think corporations...
Actually, corporations are legally supposed to act to the best interest of their shareholders.
So we're all part of the problem here.
Because we expect these companies to do well.
Otherwise, we pull our money out and put it in someone else.
And the other company may be doing just the kind of advertising we're talking about.
So the enemy is us.
But that leads to a really important question I was going to hope come up, is that adults are hit maybe in a different way, but just as hard as kids are.
So it's like, you know, I have to say this, I don't remember ever turning on the television, or even radio, because I'm in the business, and for no particular reason thinking, oh, I need to have that.
Because somebody said I'd be bigger, faster, stronger, or I'd be a better person because of having a thing.
So isn't really the next step out of this really getting people conscious to how we're manipulated in so many different ways, even if they are kids?
I mean, you said the big break-off was like in the 90s when this really started to get prevalent.
But there are people who are in their 50s and 60s that weren't a part of that generation, and they're being as pushed upon as much as kids are, I think.
One of the things is that marketing targets emotions and not cognition.
And I think that we're all susceptible to marketing.
And so I think that defending against it is certainly possible for adults.
But it's not easy to do.
And with children, it's that much harder.
And children are not adults in teeny tiny bodies.
I mean, until the age of eight, kids can't understand persuasive intent.
They don't understand the fundamental basis of advertising, and that's why in 1978, the Federal Trade Commission actually recommended stopping television advertising to children under the age of 8. Didn't work, though.
Well, not only did it not work, what Congress did, because there was so much corporate pressure on them, is to severely restrict the FTC's ability to regulate marketing to kids.
And now, it's easier to regulate marketing in adults in this country than it is to regulate marketing to children.
I mean, that's crazy.
So who do we call, if you're listening to this program, a lot of you out there, who do you call?
Ghostbusters.
Ghostbusters?
I knew you were going to say that.
You just call your congressman and say, I heard this show and I'm really pissed off about it?
About the show or about marketing?
Two shoes.
Very good.
She just did that ventriloquist deal in the beginning.
Comedian ventriloquist.
One thing you could do, the Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood website is commercialfreechildhood.org and we have all sorts of campaigns going on.
Real quickly, what can parents do?
Let me just give you a couple of things that you pointed out here.
One that I was really intrigued by was before you go to the grocery store, prepare your kids for what purchases will and will not be made.
Yeah, talk to them about what the trip's going to be and what you're going to buy, and that way you're not going to be blindsided.
And you can say, remember we already talked about that, and that might help the tantrums in the grocery store and things like that.
I use earplugs for those tantrums, by the way.
If you were ever to go to the grocery store, you would use earplugs, right?
Participate in national events like Turn Off TV Week and Buy Nothing Day.
Yeah, I mean, help your kids understand this as a sociopolitical issue.
As kids get older, they can understand more that they're being manipulated.
And give yourself a chance.
If you don't want to do a whole week without TV, do one night a week where there's no electronic media at all and you do something together as a family.
The easiest way is to limit TV in their bedrooms.
So at least no TV is in the bedrooms of the kids.
Yes, and really, do you need five televisions, which is what I think the average of what families have these days, four or five televisions.
You don't really need all of those TVs.
And really, keep electronic media out of your child's bedroom.
Even with preschoolers, I mean, a preschooler's risk of obesity goes up for every hour that they watch television, but it goes up even more if there's a TV in their bedroom.
And now 19% of babies under the age of one Wow.
A baby's under the age of one.
I mean, there's no reason for that.
That's a parent thing, right?
Electronic babysitter?
No, well, actually, the primary reason that parents give...
There was just research on this.
The primary reason that parents give for putting TV in babies' bedrooms is because they believe the marketing, that it's educational.
And we have a Federal Trade Commission complaint filed against three baby media companies for their false and deceptive marketing.
Yeah, it's not educational for babies.
And then the last thing is schools.
One minute left.
One thing that you can do is take a look at the advertising and marketing in your children's school.
Schools are strapped for cash.
They're turning to corporations for money or advertising in exchange for money, but research out of Arizona State University just showed that it's not a good deal for schools.
They're not making that much money on that.
You have to look at whether you really need it in your school.
I don't think you do.
What's Channel 1?
And Channel One is a commercially sponsored news program that's in schools.
It's in 12,000 schools all over the country.
And it's 10 minutes of news, 2 minutes of commercials, a lot of, you know, promotion.
I mean, the idea of a corporation choosing what current events kids are going to learn each day is concerning enough.
But now what research shows is that what the kids remember, they remember the commercials a lot better than the news.
Why do they even have television in schools like that?
I didn't realize they were doing that.
Channel One has been around for a long time.
It was actually just sold.
Actually, there's been a lot of activism around Channel One and they're not doing very well and they were just sold for not very much money to a marketing firm.
Susan Lynn, thank you very much.
A whirlwind tour through a very complicated topic.
